A United Airlines Boeing 777-200ER plane lost a wheel from the left main gear shortly after takeoff from San Francisco International Airport on Thursday.
Flight UA35, which was headed for Osaka, Japan, diverted to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) after the incident, which happened at about 1:20 p.m., where it made a forced emergency landing.
The plane landed safely at LAX, according to airport spokesperson Dae Levine. Fire engines stood by but weren’t needed. The aircraft came to a stop about two-thirds of the way down a runway and was then towed away.
“Our team quickly arranged for a new aircraft to take customers to Osaka this evening,” a United Airlines spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“We’re grateful to our pilots and flight attendants for their professionalism in managing this situation. We’re also grateful to our teams on the ground who were waiting with a tug to move the aircraft soon after it landed and to our teams in the airport who assisted customers upon their arrival,” the airline stated.
“We will work with customers as well as with the owners of the damaged vehicles in SFO to ensure their needs are addressed,” United stated.
Flight attendant Buffy Bartley arrived at a staff car park at San Francisco International Airport soon after the wheel fell off a plane and damaged several cars. According to Ms. Bartley, as she walked towards her car, she noticed that other airline crew members were filming and taking pictures of the debris with their phones.
“It looked like there was clearly a lot of damage,” she told CNN.
Initially, Ms. Bartley thought that one of the cars had caught fire due to the amount of damage. However, she soon realized that the debris from the wheel had caused the damage. On speaking to people at the scene, she learned that the object had fallen from the sky just five minutes before she arrived.
Her car was parked about eight vehicles away from where the tire had struck.
“It’s a massive parking lot and so I was a little shaken up because I was parked so close to where this happened,” she said.
The aircraft carried 235 passengers, 10 crew members, and four pilots, according to United. The airline stated that the aircraft, which was constructed in 2002, has six tires on each of its two main landing gear struts and had the ability to make safe landings even with missing or damaged tires.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will investigate the cause of the wheel failure.
Boeing has faced safety incidents recently. Notably, a door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft resulted in airline regulators grounding the aircraft, which also affected United Airlines.
An audit by the FAA has found multiple instances where Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, a Boeing manufacturer, allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements. The FAA is reviewing all of Boeing’s corrective actions to determine if they fully addressed the agency’s findings, the FAA stated on March 5.
