[5] After making an approximately 1,800-mile (1,600 nmi; 2,900 km) overnight flight from Guangzhou, China, the air crew made an early morning approach to Narita Airport outside Tokyo.

[1] Other traffic landing just ahead of the accident aircraft reported "wind shear" at an altitude of under 600 meters (2,000 ft), with this information being relayed to the crew of the FedEx flight.

[6] After making a hard landing on runway 34L, the plane bounced three times, coming back down on its nose gear first (a condition called "porpoising") resulting in the loss of directional and altitudinal control.

[7] The only people on board the aircraft were the Captain, Kevin Kyle Mosley, 54, of Hillsboro, Oregon, and First Officer Anthony Stephen Pino, 49, of San Antonio, Texas.

[8] First Officer Pino, a former C-5 Galaxy pilot in the United States Air Force (1981–2004), joined FedEx Express in 2006 and had accumulated more than 6,300 total career flight hours, 879 of them on the MD-11.

It was acquired temporarily by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to use as the test bed for their Propulsion-Controlled Aircraft system (PCA) in 1995.

This deviates from approved procedures for the MD-11 during a bounce, which specifies the pilot is to hold a pitch angle of 7.5 deg and use thrust to adjust the descent rate.

[21] As a result of this accident the Japan Transport Safety Board published its final report on April 26, 2013, in which it made a number of new safety recommendations including that "in order to reduce the occurrence of MD-11 series airplanes' severe hard landing and bounce in which an overload is transferred to the MLGs and their supporting structure, the Boeing Company should improve the controllability and maneuver characteristics by improving the LSAS (Longitudinal Stability Augmentation System) functions, reducing the AGS (Auto Ground Spoilers) deployment delay time and other possible means.

In order to help pilots to conduct recovery operation from large bounces and judge the necessity of go-around, studies should be made to install a visual display and an aural warning system which show gear touchdown status on MD-11 series airplanes.

After a flight from Anchorage, Alaska, that aircraft crashed at the airport just before midnight when it bounced twice after a hard touchdown on Runway 22R, resulting in the failure of the right main landing gear.