CN-RNT Royal Air Maroc Boeing 767 showing the damages after a hard landing. Click for Larger.
Wandering around on Airliners.net, I found the first pictures I have seen of Royal Air Maroc’s Boeing 767-300 which had a hard landing back in April 2009. The aircraft was cleared to land at JFK (flying from Morocco).
After the landing there was no obvious damage to the plane and it was set up for the return flight. Then the flight crew noticed the damage during the walk-around and it is expected to cost up to $10 million to repair the damaged plane. It is currently thought that the incident was caused by wake turbulence.
It is scary to think what might have happened if the plane would have taken off without the damages found. And to think this damage was found in the dark during the walk-around! That must have been one hard landing for everyone aboard for sure.
Image: Gerard Isaacson
Air India Boeing 777-337 (ER) VT-ALK Chattisgarh
Air India has been having more problems than curry setting off fire alarms. The airline announced it will be paying 31,000 employees two weeks late.
“The national carrier is facing perhaps its toughest ever crisis,” said Kapil Kaul who is the chief executive officer.
The airline saw a loss of over $800 million in the last financial year and the future outlook isn’t looking much better.
Employees now are struggling to figure out how to pay their own bills, since banks won’t be willing to push off bills for another two weeks.
Hopefully this can be resolved soon since one of the biggest morale killers is not getting paid.
Source: Indian Express Image: Thomas Becker
Continental Airlines Boeing 737
Continental Airlines made a little mistake with sending a ten year old girl to Newark, when her grandparents were waiting for her in Cleveland.
Her grandparents called her father asking where she was when she didn’t get off the plane. For 45 long minutes the father was panicked trying to track down the location of his daughter, until discovering Continental had escorted her to the wrong airport.
Continental states that there were two flights leaving from the same doorway and miscommunication led to the girl being placed on the wrong flight. When the mistake was uncovered, the girl was placed on another plane and sent safely to her grandparents.
Continental offered to waive the $75 unaccompanied minor fee, but the father stated, “You can bet they’ll be refunding a lot more than that fee by the time I’m done with them. My father-in-law laughed when they made the offer, it was so outrageous.”
Certainly mistakes like this happen, but it seems like airlines should be ready to bend over backwards to make things right with the affected family, if for no other reason than to avoid bad publicity like they’re getting.
UPDATE: It turns out that Continental did this TWICE this weekend. They put an 8yr old girl on a wrong flight as well. Read more…
Source: WCVB
Image: code20photog
Helvetic Airwaysin Fokker 100 (HB-JVE) Joensuussa 2.8.2008.
Helvetic Airways used to have a keen pink (or magenta) livery, but now have a much more conservative swiss livery. The airline was flying mostly for SWISS and decided to change their livery to better match.
Image: s.niemelainen
Air India Boeing 747-400 in its new livery
An Air India flight from Mumbai to Frankfurt had a little scare after the cockpit got warning of a possible fire in the cargo hold.
The pilots of the Boeing 747-400 turned on the fire extinguishers and made an emergency landing back to Mumbai.
It was determined that a 6.5lb of curry that was checked by one of the flight’s passengers had set off the alarm. After a 12 hour delay, the bag was removed and the flight continued .
Now that is some hot curry!
Source: Times of India Image: howtrans38