An American Airlines MD80 made an emergency landing at Kennedy this morning during its initial climb on takeoff from La Guardia, after some sort of engine failure that caused metal debris to fall on a house. No further details are available yet on what the problem was.
There were no injuries to the 88 passengers and five crew on the plane, which was bound for Chicago O'Hare.
American's fleet of MD80s has had previous problems. Last April, after FAA inspectors found that American hadn't complied with a directive requiring inspection of MD80 wiring systems for safety problems, American grounded its MD80s (it has about 300) for inspection and canceled about 2,300 flights over several days, stranding over 100,000 passengers at airports around the country.
Last August, American was fined $7.1 million by the FAA, which said the airline had broken maintenance regulations and neglected employee drug and alcohol testing procedures in several instances that predated the April groundings.
Earlier this month, by the way, Southwest Airlines agreed to pay a fine of $7.5 million to settle an FAA complaint that it neglected in 2007 to perform certain inspections to check for cracks in fuselages of its fleet of 737s.
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2 comments:
God, what a nightmare. I know the odds of being in a fiery wreck on the way to the airport are about 10,000 times higher but still . . .
Uh, and thanks, I'm DEFINITELY not going to be getting on any MD80s. I've just heard too many horror stories about them.
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