Two Boeing 737 passenger planes suffered accidents within hours of each other on Thursday: the tire of one of them burst during landing in Turkey, while another plane skidded off the runway in Senegal.
A Boeing 737-3 plane carrying 85 people skidded off the runway at Dakar airport, capital of Senegal, injuring 10 people, according to the transport minister, an airline safety group and images of a passenger showing the plane on fire.
“Our plane just caught fire,” Malian musician Cheick Siriman Sissoko wrote in a Facebook post that showed passengers jumping down emergency slides at night as flames engulfed one side of the plane. In the background you can hear people screaming.
Transport Minister El Malick Ndiaye said the Air Sénégal flight operated by TransAir was heading to Bamako in neighboring Mali on Wednesday night with 79 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew.
The injured were treated at a hospital, while the others were taken to a hotel to rest. Boeing referred a request for comment to the airlines.
Also on Thursday, 190 people were safely evacuated from a plane in Turkey after one of its tires burst – “a front landing gear failure” – while landing at a southern airport, Turkey’s Transport Ministry said. . Nobody was hurt.
The Boeing 737-800, belonging to Turkey-based Corendon Airlines, stopped safely on the runway after landing at Gazipasa airport, near the Mediterranean coastal city of Alanya, the company said. The plane, carrying 184 passengers and six crew members, was flying from Cologne, Germany.
Corendon Airlines denied Turkish media reports that the plane had landed on its nose. Turkey’s Transport and Infrastructure Ministry reported damage to the plane’s front axle but did not provide details.
The runway was not damaged, but flights were diverted to nearby Antalya airport while the plane was removed.
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It was the third incident involving a Boeing plane this week. On Wednesday, a Boeing 767 cargo plane belonging to FedEx Express made an emergency landing at Istanbul airport after its front landing gear failed. No one was injured and the crew evacuated the plane safely.
The company has been under intense pressure since a Boeing 737 Max door plug exploded during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, leaving a gaping hole in the plane. In February, the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix quality problems and meet safety standards for building airplanes after the crash.
The incident has raised scrutiny on Boeing to the highest level since two Boeing 737 Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people. About a dozen relatives of passengers who died in the second crash have been pressing the U.S. government to revive a criminal fraud charge against the company by determining that Boeing violated the terms of a 2021 agreement.
In April, a Boeing whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, testified at a congressional hearing that the company had taken manufacturing shortcuts to produce 787s as quickly as possible, which could lead to the planes breaking down.
© 2024 The Canadian Press