“Why am I seeing sky all of a sudden?” That was the thought in the co-pilot’s head, he later told investigators, a second or two after his captain called “go around” on a bounced landing at London Heathrow. By then the tail of their DHL Airbus A300-600F had already scraped Runway 09L.

On Thursday 12 November 2026, the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) published its bulletin on the accident to D-AEAG, a European Air Transport Leipzig freighter flying for DHL, on 12 October 2025. Nobody was hurt. The 1992-built jet was damaged beyond economical repair.

The report explains how a calm-weather landing turned into a tailstrike and a go-around with the thrust reversers already selected, a combination that the operator’s and Airbus manuals both rule out.

A routine arrival from Leipzig

The two pilots had flown in from Leipzig/Halle, Germany, on a cargo flight that aeroTELEGRAPH and Simple Flying identify as QY2212. The captain, with 3,600 hours of which 2,572 were on type, flew a stable ILS approach to Runway 09L and took manual control late in the approach, as company procedures require. The wind was light and visibility was more than 10 km.

The flare began at about 30 ft. The left main gear touched first, then the right, and the A300 bounced briefly. As the throttles reached idle, the ground spoilers began to extend and the captain selected reverse idle, a step the AAIB says was likely an automatic, habitual action.

After the second touchdown, the captain pulled back on the control column to stop the nosewheel from slamming down. Combined with the nose-up effect of the extending ground spoilers, that took the pitch attitude to 12.3 degrees. The A300’s tail skid touches the runway at 11.2 degrees with the shock absorbers fully compressed.

Go-around with the reversers opening

About three seconds after the first touchdown, the captain called “go around”. He told the AAIB that the second bounce felt like a high bounce he had once experienced as the monitoring pilot, and that he had not realised, through what he called “muscle memory”, that he had already selected reverse idle.

Roughly 1.5 seconds later the co-pilot called “pitch, pitch”, at about the moment the throttles reached takeoff/go-around thrust. But the reverser sleeves were already moving. By design, the engines will not spool up until the sleeves are closed and latched again, so they stayed at idle while the speed bled away to 107 knots.

The jet lifted off at about 110 knots but did not achieve a rate of climb for another eight seconds. Passing about 850 ft, the crew saw a reverser-unlock caution for the No. 1 engine. The AAIB could not explain why the sleeves were sensed as unlocked until about 1,200 ft, though video and flight data showed they had closed and stayed closed.

Big Jet TV’s live footage of the D-AEAG landing, the video the AAIB used to estimate the moment of the tailstrike.

Neither pilot said anything on the cockpit voice recorder to show they knew the tail had hit. The A300 has no tailstrike detection system. When the Heathrow tower passed on a report from someone on the ground, one of the crew called it “a possibility”. They flew a standard go-around and landed on Runway 09R.

Light bounce or high bounce?

Airbus and the operator split bounces into two kinds. After a light bounce of 5 ft or less, the crew holds a normal pitch attitude, keeps the thrust at idle and lands. After a high bounce, they go around. Both sets of manuals add one condition: once reverse thrust is selected, a full-stop landing must be completed.

The catch is telling the two apart. Airbus considered this bounce a light one, but told the AAIB there are no predefined parameters to categorise a high versus a light bounce. Only four seconds passed between the first touch of the left main gear and the captain pushing the throttles fully forward.

The AAIB concluded that the tailstrike came from the commanded pitch increase, made worse by the spoiler pitch-up. It found that selecting reverse thrust before the go-around did not contribute to the tailstrike, but noted that going around after selecting reverse is contrary to standard procedures and delays engine spool-up.

A one-way trip to Lleida

The damage was worse than it first looked. The operator’s engineers found the skin buckled inwards at frame 77 of the lower tail, rivets separated, the tail skid abraded and an internal bulkhead frame deformed, damage classed as severe. The aircraft was grounded at Heathrow for several months and then retired.

According to Flightradar24 data cited by Simple Flying, D-AEAG was patched up for one last flight on 31 January 2026, flying from London to Lleida in Spain for storage and scrapping. It was an unglamorous end for an airframe that had started life as a passenger jet in 1992 and had flown as a DHL freighter since its conversion in 2011.

The lesson the report leaves behind is a human one. A well-drilled habit, reverse idle on main-wheel touchdown, collided with a split-second decision to go around. In four seconds on a calm Sunday afternoon, the A300 lost its tail section and its career.

Sources: UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB Bulletin 11/2026, D-AEAG), FlightGlobal, Simple Flying, AeroCorner, Big Jet TV

Header photo: Alan Wilson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0