During a Frontier Airlines attempt to land in Puerto Rico last month, a nose landing gear wheel and tire detached and struck an engine as well as the wing, as reported.
preliminary report
as reported by the National Transportation Safety Board.
On April 15,
Frontier Flight 3506, an Airbus A321, was arriving from Orlando International Airport when its first landing attempt failed at Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. According to the flight crew, the first officer was the pilot flying, and the captain was the pilot monitoring during the night flight. There were 228 passengers and seven crew members on board.
When the plane was about 15 feet above the ground, the captain called for a go-around, instructing the first officer to abort the landing. The captain believed the aircraft was “running out of flying speed quickly” so he took over and accelerated to circle the airport just as the plane touched down, according to the NTSB report.
Data from the plane showed the wheels initially hit the ground at 2.2 times the force of gravity, greater than Frontier’s “hard landing” limit of 1.8 Gs.
During the go-around, the pilots “heard a loud bang coming from under the fuselage” and the first officer said that an engine failure was displayed on the electronic centralized aircraft monitor display, according to the NTSB.
The captain requested an inspection of the runway, during which metal and tire debris were discovered.
The debris from the impaired nose landing gear was ingested into the aircraft’s left engine and struck portions of the wing, according to the findings of the NTSB.
The aircraft approached close to the air traffic control tower to verify if all three landing gears had deployed correctly, with a controller confirming their apparent functionality. Subsequently, the plane made a routine touchdown, and the travelers disembarked via the airstairs without incident.
The initial NTSB report doesn’t identify the cause of the incident; this explanation will typically appear in the final report, generally released approximately one year later.
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