Friday morning at Mancunian airport, the wings of two planes from the Easyjet company to Gibraltar and Paris touched while they were rolling towards the track to take off.
The incident could have caused much more serious disruption at Manchester airport. Friday morning at 6:30 am, two planes from the Low-Cost Easyjet company saw their wings touch while they were heading for the track to take off: one was bound for Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle while the other took the direction of Gibraltar.
No one injured is to be deplored but the Mancunian airport briefly suspended its flights to assess “if the planes could return to their stand, which they were able to do” according to a site spokesman who specifies that “the operations resumed after a few minutes”.
“We felt the whole plane trembled, the shock was violent,” said one of the passengers to the BBC, evoking the intervention “of many fire trucks”.
The airline was quick to react by apologizing to customers for the delay in their flights and recalling that the security of its passengers and its crew is its “absolute priority”. Easyjet also announced the launch of an immediate investigation in order to shed light on the incident which did not, however, caused significant delays in the departure table from Manchester airport.
Strong disturbances in the British sky at the end of July
This intervention collision only two weeks after a technical problem disturbed more than 120 flights in the United Kingdom. The London airports of Heathrow and Gatwick, as well as that of Edinburgh, had then been impacted, the first being the most frequented air hub in Europe. According to Cirium, data supplier for aeronautics, more than 67 departures and 55 arrivals had been canceled, while a certain number of flights had also been confused.
On this occasion, the director of operations of Easyjet David Morgan had declared that it was “extremely disappointing” to see again a breakdown “disturbing our customers during this period of the year so important and charged for travel”.
“If our priority today is to help our customers, we want NATS (the British air traffic control service, editor’s note) explains the measures he takes to prevent this kind of problem from happening again.”
More than 20 years ago, the third largest airport in the United Kingdom had already been the scene of a collision on the ground between two Boeing, there too before their takeoff. An Excel Airways plane, carrying 255 passengers, had arrived from Gatwick London Airport, and was to leave for Goa, India, while the other aircraft of the former Low-Cost Bmibaby company, aboard which was 79 passengers, had to take off for Belfast, Northern Ireland. The accident had not made any victims or injured.
