ISLAMABAD – A Myanmar pilot saved the day after his aircraft’s landing gearfailed, safely putting the jet on the runway with no front wheels onSunday, an official said.
The nail-biting touchdown — in which no one was hurt — was the secondinstance of a malfunctioning flight in less than a week within the country.
Myanmar Airlines flight UB-103 — an Embraer-190 model — touched theground at around 9:00 am in Mandalay (0230 GMT), a city popular amongforeign tourists. The plane carried 82 passengers and a crew of seven.
An unverified video circulated on social media showed a graceful landingbefore the plane’s nose dipped gradually to the runway, and the craftslowly ground to a halt.
Ye Htut Aung, deputy director general of Myanmar’s Civil AviationDepartment, told AFP the pilot tried repeatedly to deploy the front landinggear — first through its computer system, then manually.
“They tried hard twice by flying around twice and asked to check whetherthe nose wheel dropped or not,” Ye Htut Aung said, calling it a “technicalfault”.
“So they had to land with the back wheels… The pilot could land itskillfully,” he said. “There were no casualties.”
Ye Htut Aung said engineers sent by Myanmar National Airlines would examinethe aircraft, adding that all jets get a daily flight check.
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For its part, Embraer said in a statement that it was “offering its fullcooperation to the aviation authorities in order to aid in theinvestigation”.
Passenger Soe Moe told AFP: “Smoke came out a little when we landed… Allpassengers are okay.”
Sunday’s incident came just four days after a Biman Bangladesh Airlinesplane skidded off a runway while landing at Yangon airport in a storm,injuring 11 passengers.
Myanmar’s monsoon season has caused problems for commercial and militaryflights in the past.
A military plane crashed into the Andaman Sea in 2017, killing all 122people on board in one of the deadliest aviation accidents in the country’shistory. Authorities blamed bad weather.
And in 2015, an Air Bagan passenger plane veered off the runway amid badweather and heavy rain. A passenger and a person on the ground were killed.-APP/AFP
