Series of mishaps at Boeing expanded
A vacation plane’s tire bursts during landing
May 9, 2024, 4:37 p.m
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Hardly a day goes by without a report of a new breakdown on a Boeing aircraft. The most recent example: The tire of a 737 bursts while landing. Luckily, the 190 people on board escaped with a shock.
A plane that took off from Germany with 190 people on board landed safely on the nose gear in the Turkish seaside resort of Alanya despite a burst front tire. This was reported by the state broadcaster TRT. The tire of the Boeing 737 of the Turkish low-cost airline Corendon Airlines burst during landing for unknown reasons. All 190 people on board the plane that took off from Cologne/Bonn Airport were safely evacuated and there were no reports of injuries, TRT quoted the Ministry of Transport as saying.
The incident occurred at Gazipasa Airport in Alanya around 11 a.m. (local time), as the broadcaster further reported. The plane’s front landing gear was damaged when it was briefly dragged over the rim, Gazipasa district governor Orhan Altun told the broadcaster. At the same time, he praised the pilot’s “very successful landing maneuver.”
Alanya is a district in the southern coastal province of Antalya and is popular with tourists from Germany and other western countries, especially in the summer season. It is still unclear whether there were mainly holidaymakers on board. An investigation into the incident is underway, it said.
FedEx plane slides on fuselage over runway
Just on Wednesday, a Boeing 763 from the logistics group FedEx landed on the fuselage at Istanbul Airport after problems with the front landing gear, as the airport announced. Nobody was injured. A video distributed by the DHA news agency showed how the Boeing touched down with the main landing gear and then slid over the runway for meters on the front part of the fuselage. The airport said the front landing gear could not be extended.
The cargo plane took off from Paris. The error was apparently discovered before landing; the pilot had requested the control tower to land with the fuselage, it was said. Emergency services and the fire department were then dispatched to the runway, TRT reported.
Meanwhile, a Boeing 737 passenger plane with 85 people on board left the runway at the airport in the Senegalese capital Dakar. Transport Minister El Malick Ndiaye said ten people were injured in the accident. Footage from an eyewitness showed the machine burning. “Our plane just caught fire,” wrote Malian musician Cheick Siriman Sissoko in a Facebook post. Passengers could be seen jumping onto emergency slides in the dark as flames engulfed one side of the plane. People screaming could be heard in the background.
The Air Sénégal flight, operated by TransAir, was scheduled to take 79 passengers, two pilots and five flight attendants from Dakar to Bamako on Wednesday evening when the accident occurred. The cause is still unclear. The minister said the injured were taken to a hospital and the remaining passengers were accommodated in a hotel.
Boeing has been in constant crisis for five years
The incidents are in line with other breakdowns in Boeing aircraft. The company has been in a constant crisis since the crashes of two 737 MAX jets with 346 deaths more than five years ago. A more than 20-month launch ban for the machines in the series and problems with other models have put the manufacturer far behind its European rival Airbus since March 2019.
When a fuselage part finally broke out of an almost new 737-9 MAX on an Alaska Airlines flight in early January 2024, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) took action. Initially, machines were no longer allowed to start until a technical inspection was carried out. The authority also takes a close look at the production and control processes.