A JetBlue airliner with faulty landing gear touched down safely at Los Angeles International Airport after circling the region for three hours with its front wheels turned sideways, unable to be retracted into the plane.
The pilot landed on the back wheels, then eased onto the awry front tires, which shot flames along the runway before they tore off. The metal landing gear scraped for the final meters as the plane came to a stop.
Within minutes of landing on Wednesday, the plane's door opened and the 140 passengers walked down a stairway with their luggage and onto the tarmac, where buses waited.
PHOTO: AP
"We all cheered. I was bawling. I cried so much," said Christine Lund, 25.
Passengers said they had watched their own drama unfolding on the news on in-flight televisions until just before the landing. One described it as surreal to watch. Another said she would have been calmer without it.
"At the end it was the worst because you didn't know if it was going to work, if we would catch fire. It was very scary. Grown men were crying," said Diane Hamilton, 32, a television graphics specialist.
As the plane was about to touch the ground, Hamilton said, crew members ordered people to assume a crash position, putting their heads between their knees.
"They would yell, `Brace! Brace! Brace!'" she said. "I thought this would be it."
The plane landed on an auxiliary runway where fire trucks and emergency crews had massed as a precaution. No injuries were immediately reported among the passengers and six crew members, fire officials said.
"It was a very, very smooth landing. The pilot did an outstanding job," said fire battalion chief Lou Roupoli. "There was a big hallelujah and a lot of clapping on that aircraft."
JetBlue flight 292 had left Bob Hope Airport in Burbank at 3:17pm for New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, JetBlue spokesman Bryan Baldwin said.
The Airbus A320 first circled the Long Beach Airport, about 50km south of Burbank, then was cleared to land at Los Angeles International Airport. It stayed aloft to burn off fuel and lighten its weight, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Donn Walker said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS