Passengers on Air India Express flight AXB938 from Hyderabad, India, experienced a terrifying arrival at Thailand's Phuket airport after the plane nosedived onto the tarmac, according to major media reports. The Boeing 737 Max damaged its nose during the landing, with footage showing the aircraft with 133 people on board making a hard landing at the airport, which is just yards from the beachfront. The aircraft left a trail of smoke behind it as it screeched to a halt without its nose wheel, and images show the plane with just the wheel fork left underneath it, with a long skid mark on the tarmac where the metal jammed and dragged along the concrete surface.
Heavy smoke is visible from a plane that made a very hard landing at Phuket airport on Wednesday morning. Today's flight suffered damage to its landing gear when it hit the runway, according to Phuket Airport officials. ' The emergency services met the plane after the landing, and passengers were able to disembark.
One passenger, who was filming the approach to the airport, appeared to drop his phone due to the impact. After reaching his phone, he zooms in on an object next to the runway, thought to be the landing wheel. The cause of the nose wheel issue on the Boeing 737 Max during landing has not been determined.
Flights at Phuket airport, one of the busiest hubs in Thailand, were briefly disrupted after the Boeing 737 Max made its bumpy landing today. The airport was closed for hours before services resumed at 6pm local time, according to Metro. However, Expressen reports that after the incident, the airport is keeping the runway closed, which has a major impact on air traffic.
Research findings indicate that these statements are not in conflict but describe different phases of the same event: the runway was temporarily closed from approximately 12:08 PM to 6:00 PM local time for the removal of the disabled aircraft and safety checks, causing significant flight disruptions and diversions, with operations resuming at the scheduled time. The extent of the damage to the aircraft and the runway remains unclear, and authorities have not specified what specific actions are being taken to investigate the incident. The flight was operated by Air India Express, a subsidiary of Air India.
This incident comes months after the fatal Air India flight 171 tragedy, which left only one survivor on board the doomed plane. Air India was involved in the Ahmedabad plane disaster that killed 260 people last year. Air India has come under pressure as an investigation into the cause of that crash is ongoing, with officials reportedly leaning towards deliberate pilot action after a mechanical failure was ruled out.
Air India Express, the budget arm of the parent airline, was told off by India's aviation watchdog for allegedly not changing engine parts on an Airbus A320 plane and falsifying records over it, according to the watchdog.