Malaysia Airlines plane grounded after aircraft belly hit by ground vehicle
The Malaysian Insider – 2 hours 5 minutes agoRELATED CONTENT
- Malaysia Airlines flight grounded after aircraft belly hit by ground vehicle – B …
Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has retimed its MH740/741 flights after the aircraft's belly was hit by an airside vehicle (ground vehicles used for maintenance, refuelling, etc.) at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) today.
The B737-800 aircraft was scheduled to depart to Yangon (flight MH740) at 10.05am but due to the incident, passengers were transferred to a different aircraft which took off at 10.45am, MAS said in a statement in Putrajaya today.
The return flight (MH741) has been retimed to depart Yangon at 12.30pm, it said.
The airline said the driver of the vehicle which belongs to a vendor had been immediately reprimanded.
MAS operations director Captain Izham Ismail said their engineers were on site to assess the damage.
"The preliminary assessment showed no immediate risk to the structure of the aircraft. However the grounding of the aircraft was necessary to conduct a thorough check," he said.
Izham reiterated that the safety of its passengers remained paramount to MAS.
Adversity struck Malaysia Airlines (MAS) again today when a Yangon-bound Boeing 737 aircraft was grounded when a service vehicle crashed into it at the KL International Airport (KLIA).
In the 8.50am incident, a 25-year-old driver of the service vehicle, a Perodua Viva belonging to a MAS vendor company, had apparently parked the car next to the aircraft before getting off to supervise the loading of luggage into its cargo hold.
It is learnt that the driver apparently had not engaged the parking brakes of the car properly and this resulted in the vehicle rolling off.
The runaway car then crashed into the rear lower fuselage of the aircraft.
The car became lodged under the aircraft and personnel of MAS engineering department later removed the vehicle by deflating its tyres to lower it.
The aircraft was later towed to a maintenance hangar for a thorough inspection on the damage which is said to be just "minor scratches" to the rear belly of the Boeing 737.
It is also learnt that the Yangon flight, which was delayed following the incident, resumed later in another MAS Boeing 737.
Sepang police chief Supt Mohd Yusoff Awang confirmed the case.
He said MAS did not lodge a police report on the accident as it was carrying out its own internal investigations.
Malaysia Airlines in the statement apologised to all passengers of MH740/741 today for the disruption to their travel plans. – Bernama, May 15, 2014.
