Shocking Ethiad Ground accident

Pictures now are emerging of last nights shocking EY ground accident.

The brand new 346 was performing an engine test at the Airbus Toulouse factory when it jumped its chocks and ended up going into/over a concrete blast fence some 60meters away. Nine staff were badly injured.

Pictures are here:

airliners.net picture
skyliner picture

Plane is clearly a write off- the cockpit was completly detached from the rest of the a/c.

Amazing no one was killed- I certainly wouldnt want a 346 running towards me.

[preiffer]

Chocks and brakes to hold an A346 at full throttle in place? [:0]

I'm amazed they don't have something a little more substantial - like something that ties it down!

[Neil]

[:0] Thanks for posting the links.

I am amazed that nobody was killed. I guess new procedures for engine tests will be brought into place pretty pronto.

Third incident in the last few weeks for the A346 - SA runway overshoot at CPT and the IB incident at Quito. The IB A346 is also looking like a write off...[:(]

Strange how things happen in 3's.

Originally posted by willd
Plane is clearly a write off- the cockpit was completly detached from the rest of the a/c.

Amazing no one was killed- I certainly wouldnt want a 346 running towards me.

I agree that the engine test crew had a lucky escape, however, if there's no damage to the wing box, and nothing worse than a tailscrape behind the wingbox, it's likely that the section forward of the wingbox is repairable - but it depends on if the insurer wants to pay out or write it off.

(Remember, Qantas repaired VH-OJH after it's visit to the golf course at Don Muang, and that was in a terrible way forward of the wingbox. The insurers wanted to write it off totally. QF wouldn't let them, because they hadn't had a hull loss in their entire history, and didn't want to start now.)

Mike

I wouldn't fancy flying on her repaired[:0]aircraft equivalent of a cut and shut:D

That must hurt. At least they can conclude that the engines worked!

High powered engine runs not for the faint hearted, A346 not bad but the B777 with the 115,000lb thrust engine is serious stuff.