The landing gear of a Southwest Airlines jet collapsed after it landed at New York’s La Guardia Airport Monday evening, injuring more than 10 people onboard and temporarily closing one of the nation’s busiest airports, authorities said.
Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 made a dramatic landing at New York’s La Guardia Airport this afternoon. There are differing reports as to what exactly happened: The Wall Street Journal says the plane’s landing gear collapsed as it was taxing, while CNN’s take is that the front landing gear collapsed as the plane landed.
The AP reports that there have been “several” reports of injuries and the Port Authority temporarily shut down the airport.
The Boeing BA 737, with 149 people on board including the crew, had just landed at La Guardia around 5:40 p.m. when the nose gear failed, authorities said. It was landing after a roughly two-hour flight from Nashville International Airport, authorities said.
Six passengers and at least three crew members were transported to a local hospital for back and neck pain, and four were treated at the scene, said a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. Four other passengers suffered anxiety attacks. Authorities said the plane didn’t catch on fire.
Officials couldn’t say Monday evening precisely when the nose gear failed. The aircraft touched down within the first 1,000 feet of the runway, La Guardia General Manager Thomas Bosco said, and skidded off the runway into a grassy area about halfway down its 7,000-foot length.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigator was surveying the damage on the runway Monday night. Officials hoped to reopen the runway Tuesday morning.
The incident caused delays for dozens of flights in and out of La Guardia Airport, with delays rippling out across the country, authorities said.
Matt Lewis, 48, a software salesman from Matthews, N.C., said he was on a US Airways flight that was about to take off for Charlotte when his plane was grounded and more than a dozen other planes were brought to a dead halt in and around the runway.
“It looked like it just crumbled on impact,” Mr. Lewis said of the airliner’s nose landing gear.
Overall, air travel in recent years has had its strongest safety record since the dawn of the jet age. The incident at La Guardia comes after a recent cluster of high-profile commercial aviation accidents in July, including the crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that killed three in San Francisco, a fire aboard a parked and empty Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner at Heathrow Airport in London and a gear-up landing of a Russian Sukhoi regional jet on a test flight in Iceland on Sunday that injured one of the five aboard.
