American Airlines has confirmed that it is working with the FAA and US National Transportation Safety Board to analyze an MD-82 landing incident at the Charlotte Douglas International airport the night of 12 December.
The crew of Flight 1402, flying to Charlotte from Dallas Fort-Worth with 110 passengers and five crew, was performing an instrument landing at Charlotte in poor visibility at 2248h that night when the aircraft's right wing received "substantial" damage, according to the FAA preliminary incident report.
American Airlines is not commenting on the incident, other than to say that the " damage was not caused by an attempted auto-land" and that there were no reported injuries to the passengers and crew.
Air traffic control tapes reveal that the tower controllers had asked the pilots if they would be performing a go-around as the aircraft approached the runway end, an indication that aircraft might have appeared to controllers to be on an unstabilized approach. The pilots however responded, "No, we're on the ground".
The wing scrape comes three days after a Northwest Airlines DC-9 scraped its wing on landing at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport on the morning of 9 December in very gusty wind conditions. None of the passengers or crew on Flight 7012 were injured.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
