Two United Planes Touched at Boston's Logan Airport
A United Airlines Boeing 737Photo: Daniel Slim / AFP (Getty Images)
The skies have been less than friendly in recent years. Besides passengers still causing chaos in airliner cabins and carrier scheduling systems collapsing, near-misses and tarmac incidents are happening more and more frequently. The most recent incident happened on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport yesterday morning and involved two United Airlines aircraft.
Two United Airlines Boeing 737 were scheduled to depart Boston at around the same time. United Flight 515 was headed to Newark, and Flight 267 was bound for Denver. CNN reported that Flight 515 was being pushed back from the gate at 8:30 a.m. until the Boeing’s right wing collided with the tail of Flight 267. The damaged aircraft couldn’t continue on and returned to their gates. The passengers on both flights were rescheduled to afternoon departures.
No one was hurt during the light collision, but both airliners’ passengers certainly felt the contact. Nicholas Leone, a passenger on Flight 515, told CNN, “I felt a sudden jolt and look to my right to see that the plane had crashed into the still plane. After seeing the fire trucks and police cars, people were a little rattled. Thankfully everyone was able to offboard quickly.” This was the second time that a United Airlines flight was involved in an incident at Logan Airport in the last week.
Last week Monday, JetBlue Flight 206 was prepared to land at Logan Airport when a private Learjet 60 took off on an intersecting runway without clearance. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the JetBlue Embraer 190 took evasive action to avoid a collision as the private jet crossed its path. The two planes came within 565 feet of each other.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating both the United Airlines tarmac contact and JetBlue’s near-miss with a Learjet. These inquiries are in addition to the four other runway near-misses in the United States so far this year.
