Poor maintenance on an airliner can either delay a flight at best or endanger the lives of everyone onboard at worst. The nose gear on a TUI Boeing 737 suddenly collapsed earlier this week at Brussels Airport after arriving from Spain. Thankfully, the Belgian carrier’s plane was parked at the gate and no passengers were onboard.
The failure was caught on camera and spread across social media. Without warning, the nose fell to the tarmac like a child tripping on their shoelaces. Landing gear failures don’t typically happen at a standstill. The fault is provoked by the tremendous stresses of take-off and landing, like the spat of incidents with United Airlines Boeing 777 planes. Most remember where a United plane lost a nose wheel during take-off in San Francisco. The loose wheel landed in an employee parking lot and carved a path of destruction.
Like with United Airlines, experts point to poor maintenance by TUI as the cause of the spontaneous failure. Futurism reported:
In an interview with HLN, aviation journalist Luk de Wilde called the collapse “exceptional” — but said it probably doesn’t represent quite as huge a safety hazard as it would appear at first.
“When an aircraft lands, the landing gear retracts,” he explained, “and thanks to gravity and the weight of an aircraft, that will always happen.”
De Wilde conjectured that the cause was “probably a human error by maintenance personnel or the crew” — an admission that TUI itself does not seem ready to make.
TUI’s operations were already in question after an idiotic incident last month. A flight attendant fell from a parked plane onto the tarmac. She opened an aircraft door while preparing for a flight and expected the stairs to be still attached to the plane. She was rushed to the hospital after the fall, according to the Independent. No passenger is encouraged to buy a ticket when these incidents happen at an airline.