Here’s a screen grab.
I wonder if that was part of what caused the collision. If they had similar flight numbers, one crew may have mis-heard the taxi clearance and thought it was for them.
The smaller plane is not Delta. It’s Delta Connection. One of their lookalike RJ companies. So it’ll have a different radio callsign. The airlines love for people to equate the two until something happens, then they try real hard to distance the mainline from the lesser contracted RJ operators. Although in this case it’s not immediately obvious who was screwing up here.
I’d say “knocked off” is a pretty good description; it’s off for sure, not merely crunched.
Ouchies.
Looks kinda badass without the tail. Futuristic. Rudders are overrated, and we can just get the passengers to run forward and back for pitch control.
Are you Michael O’Leary in disguise?
Naw, if I was really going for bottom-barrel pricing, I’d just eject passengers to maintain the center of gravity unless they paid a special convenience fee.
The ABC article cited by @Llama_Llogophile has a lot of excellent pix of the aftermath. Here’s the FAA KATL Airfield Diagram (PDF). ATL is oriented east/west so the airfield diagram has north to the left, not the top. The RJ was waiting to take off on runway 8R and was sitting on Taxiway H facing north just short of entering the runway. From the position of the stopped A350 it’s clear they are westbound on Taxiway E shortly before it renames to taxiway V.
The RJ is sitting in a perfectly reasonable position. One consequence of that location is the rump of the RJ is blocking all but the very smallest jets from passing behind them on taxiway E. Taxiway H is just too short to accommodate an aircraft there and also have a widebody pass by behind them on E. A 737 or A320 would pass behind without incident.
Typically E & F are used for opposite direction traffic and in an “east flow” (taking off and landing eastbound), taxiway E is used going westbound to get to taxiway H for takeoff on 8R or is used to continue past H then enter taxiway V and proceed around the end of runway 8R to get to runway 8L.
Nevertheless, it’s on the A350 crew not to collide with stationary airplanes regardless of their clearance.
Oops.
For those who long for the golden age of flight we can thank Delta for bringing back the Clipper ships.
Nothin’ better than ending the workday with a little tail. 
Shame they were just starting out.
The A350 was bound for Tokyo. They may have had schedule pressure to be airborne in rather few minutes or need to cancel. That’s a recurring problem in very long-haul ops: the airline schedules the flight with almost no slack vs legalities and expects the crews to cut corners as necessary to rescue the situation. Of course they’ll deny that’s their actual desire after somebody’s hurry-up ends badly. Sooo short-sighted.
It was just the tail that fell off. Not like that oil tanker where the front fell off in Australia.
Ha! Rather like the Slim Pickens character in your namesake film.
Delta CEO as he’s describing the idea to the board…
I thought we’d fixed that after Tenerife. (Well, I guess there’s logically no true fix per se).
Lots of things have changed for the better since then. But the reality remains that, like every engineering problem, there’s a tradeoff between keeping large margins for reliability or small margins for cost, efficiency, weight, etc. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, the tradeoff exists.
Harking back to this post a month ago about the Aug 9 2024 Brazilian ATR-72 accident, and the various follow-up posts by various posters nearby below it:
On Sep 6 the Brazilian accident investigation agency CENIPA released a preliminary report.
All of this is still preliminary, but it looks like they knew they were flying into icing conditions. So far so ordinary. So they followed procedures and turned on prop & airframe anti-ice. So far so ordinary. There’s never a guarantee that anti-ice can overcome worst-case icing, but it’s a decent bet you’re not in worst-case conditions. And in any event you’re supposed to be watching for signs that conditions are worse than your aircraft type can handle. In the event anti-ice is not coping with the icing conditions, or is inop, the cure is to exit the icing conditions somehow: climb, descend, change course, turn back, etc.
Shortly after turning on airframe anti-ice, it gave a malfunction warning so they turned it off. And continued working the problem, but also continued flying in the icing conditions. Sounds a bit like focusing on trees and forgetting the forest. Oops.
A lot more analysis will be available once the final report comes out in a year-ish.
Cites:
CENIPA - Preliminary Report Voepass 2283 (English)
AeroTime - Voepass early report: ‘a lot of ice’ recorded before crash
Reuters - Brazil probes ice buildup in plane crash that killed 62
I think “troubleshooting technical issues and losing situational awareness” is the classic human factors trap in a lot of high-intensity high-stakes operations, including the cockpit.
Certainly, I can think of at least a couple of other incidents in recent aviation history where it happened that way.
Absolutely. IMO it’s a variant of the same mental shortcoming that sucks a txting driver into spending 20 seconds not looking outside when they think it’s 2. Kinda by definition you won’t notice the subtle stuff you’re not paying attention to.
Until it becomes unignorably un-subtle: CRUNCH!!!1!
I’m not particularly interested in being a pilot, but one thing I know is that I’d be an absolutely terrible one in large part because of my tendancy to hyper focus and want to troubleshoot or understand one thing and ignore everything else. “Ooh, blinky light …”
That’s ok provided you’ve got another pilot keeping the big picture. It’s when you get BOTH pilots sucked in to a problem that things go pear shaped.