EDMONTON - When a commercial aircraft made an emergency landing at the Edmonton International Airport last week, it
was the second time passengers of a Q400 narrowly escaped serious injury
from a broken propeller that crashed into a cabin window.
In 2007, one of the propellers from a Scandinavian Airlines flight tore through the plane’s cabin.
The incident occurred after the pilot of the Q400 noticed a malfunction
in the plane’s landing gear. The gear failed upon landing, causing the
right-hand wing to scrape the ground.
“We were very, very close to
a serious catastrophe,” Peter Reinau, head of the Aalborg Airport’s
emergency response team, said at the time in a report in the Copenhagen
Post.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is investigating
what happened in the case of Air Canada Express flight 8481 that landed
at EIA last Thursday. Initial reports stated that a tire burst on the
Q400 twin-engined, turboprop aircraft during its takeoff from Calgary.
The plane was diverted to Edmonton and passengers have reported that
another tire blew out upon landing at EIA.
A photograph posted
online by the TSB shows part of the right-side propeller lodged in a
plane window. The account of a female passenger who was injured by
debris caused by the propeller circulated widely online. She was seated
in Row 7 on the plane’s right side.
The 2007 incident in Denmark
was one of three involving a Q400 operated by Scandinavian Airlines that
occurred within a matter of weeks. According to media reports at the
time, Swedish authorities had critiqued the airline’s maintenance
practices.
The airline, meanwhile, grounded its fleet of Q400 planes in fall 2007. The aircraft is manufactured by Bombardier.
“This
was more a matter of perception than anything else,” said Hans
Ollongren, the airline’s head of public affairs, on Thursday. “I don’t
think we actually questioned the technical or operational viability of
the aircraft. But if you’ve had three consecutive incidents with the
same type of aircraft there is a risk this will influence customer
perception of your brand.”
Ollongren, who worked at the airline in
2007, said the Aalborg Airport incident could have been worse if the
captain had not decided to move passengers sitting under the wing to the
front and back of the plane before landing.
“Because he suspected
this might happen and it did. If he did not move the people from those
seats, they could have been killed,” Ollongren said.
The company entered negotiations with Bombardier and purchased its CRJ900 regional jet to replace its Q400 fleet.
“It’s
very difficult to determine whether the reason for (the Edmonton)
accident is the same as for ours. What seems to have happened in
Edmonton was the tire (blew out) and if you try to land this aircraft
with a broken tire, it might impact the stability of the landing gear
... You cannot, at this stage, draw any conclusion there’s a similarity
between the two accidents.”
Bombardier spokeswoman Marianella de la Barrera said, “it was not the exact same scenario.”
“I
can only speak to our understanding with the information that is
publicly known, and that is that a tire burst. The aircraft was diverted
to land in Edmonton and upon landing an event occurred. But the key
difference here is that a tire burst,” she said.
Eighty-one
Q400 aircraft are registered in Canada. The Q400 and Q400 NextGen have
performed more than five million takeoffs and landings across the world
and logged almost five million flight hours, according to Bombardier.
“There
are no other turboprops that operate in North America. It tells you how
robust and reliable these aircraft are,” said de la Barrera, manager of
public affairs and external communications at Bombardier. “They are
designed to be robust and reliable in that regard, in consideration of
the high cycle demands of regional airline operators because they do so
many takeoffs and landings per day.”
Previous investigations by
Canadian and European aviation safety authorities “endorsed the
integrity and the design of the aircraft landing gear system,” she said.
- Source: http://www.edmontonjournal.com
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