3 bits fall from jet

Press, 18 December 1985, Page 10

3 bits fall from jet

NZPA-PA London Aviation experts were baffled yesterday to learn that not one but three bits had broken away from a British Airways jumbo jet seconds before it landed in the United States on Monday.

A three-metre wing-flap bounced off the roof of a house and hit a parked car as startled residents ran for cover in the district of Revere, Boston. But as an urgent investigation began American air safety officials said that they were also looking for another two-metre section of wing-flap and a tail-cone from one of the aircraft’s jet engine exhausts. The cone came from the No. 3 engine, on the opposite wing to the missing flaps. No-one was injured and the Boeing 747, on a flight from London, landed safely at Boston’s Logan Airport with 245 passengers and 17 crew on board.

The United States Federal Aviation Administration grounded the jet and British

Airways engineers and safety experts went to Boston to examine it.

An F.A.A. spokesman said that the missing parts could be in the water. ! ‘The house which was hit is on a peninsula,” he said. The American experts believe that the two flap sections broke away together, but they do not know when the exhaust cone came away. Flaps extend the area of the wing to gain more lift at lower speeds during the critical landing and take-off times.

They have broken away before. A flap from a 747 was found in a field at Pangbourne, Berkshire, in September, although' officials have yet to trace the foreign airline believed to have been concerned.

Every year in the United Kingdom an average of about 100 incidents of objects falling from aircraft are reported. Incidents this year have ranged from lumps of ice to a Sidewinder air-to-air missile.