The Federal Aviation Administration has said it will investigate after a Boeing 757 being used by Delta Air Lines lost its front wheel as it readied to take off from an airport in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, with the tire rolling across the tarmac and down a hill.
Set to fly from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to Bogotá, Colombia, Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was moments from takeoff when another one of its tires abruptly detached. In air traffic control audio obtained by YouTube channel VASAviation, another Delta pilot in the taxi queue can be heard warning Flight 982 about the problem.
“One of your nose tires just came off,” he says. “It just rolled off the runway behind you.” Shortly after, a Southwest pilot in the queue jumps in to demand if air traffic control is going to route them onto a different runway “’cause this looks like it could be quite a while.”
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After letting the control tower know they’ve arranged to be tugged off the runway, the Delta pilot apologizes, jokingly remarking, “This is a new one.”
The preliminary report from the FAA notes that the tire came to rest on the south side of the runway, down an embankment.
Flight 982 aborted its takeoff and its 172 passengers were deplaned, returning to the terminal via buses, according to a Delta spokesperson. No injuries were reported in the incident, and the passengers were eventually put on another aircraft to their destination, the report states. They took off more than five hours after Flight 982 was originally scheduled to depart, according to flight data.
“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the Delta spokesperson added.
A Boeing spokesman declined to comment on the incident to The New York Times, directing questions to Delta.
Boeing has faced strong headwinds and heightened scrutiny over its manufacturing and safety standards in the past, having manufactured the planes involved in two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that left all 346 aboard dead. Alarm has recently risen again over a Jan. 5 incident in which a door plug blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 being operated by Alaska Airlines at 16,000 feet. (A handful of passengers who suffered minor injuries sued Boeing a week later.)
The midair blowout prompted the FAA to ground more than 100 of Boeing’s Max 9s indefinitely as it investigated. On Tuesday, Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci told NBC News that the airline’s own in-house inspectors had found loose bolts in “many” of the Boeing planes among its fleet.
