Boeing Plane Fails to Deploy Nose Landing Gear, Skids to a Halt on Runway
Full Frontal
Boeing's safety issues have once again been caught on camera, as a new video of an intense emergency landing in Istanbul shows one of its cargo planes failing to deploy some of its landing gears.
As Reuters reports, a FedEx-operated Boeing 737 was recorded skidding to a halt at Istanbul Airport earlier this week as its front landing gears remained upright.
As now-viral CCTV videos of the incident show, the cargo plane's nose created such friction during its emergency landing that large plumes of fire were visible behind it.
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As the report notes, the 10-year-old FedEx cargo plane had been flying from Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport when its pilot informed the Istanbul Airport's control tower that the craft's front landing gears weren't deploying. With help from officials in the control tower, the plane landed safely, and as the CCTV footage of the incident shows, the pilots kept the nose of the plane upward in what the SKYbrary aviation database describes as the emergency landing protocols when nose gears fail to deploy.
Although firefighters were present at the scene and doused the plane with foam, no major fire ultimately broke out.
The Turkish Transport Military confirmed to Reuters that there had been no injuries and that the agency was launching an investigation into the matter, which comes after months of bad press for Boeing as its planes keep grabbing headlines over safety problems.
Pile-Up
Last June, as Reuters adds, a similar incident occurred at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport in North Carolina when the nose gears failed to deploy on a Delta-operated 717 passenger jet. As the FlightGlobal website reported at the time, the small plane had 96 passengers, two pilots, and three flight attendants when it, too, was forced to land without its front gears. Luckily, no one was hurt during that debacle, either.
Along with the highly-publicizied safety issues, the resignation of its CEO, and multiple US investigations, Boeing has also come under fire after two of its whistleblowers died — one from an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound in March, and another from a fast-spreading staph infection earlier this month.
Clearly, things are falling apart at Boeing — and there's no telling how much worse it will get before things get any better.
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