Video: Dreamliner Rips Through Tail of Turkish Airlines 777
It seems like 2018 has been plagued by costly ground collision between aircraft or between ground vehicles and aircraft. That trend continued Thursday with two aircraft being damaged in a collision that thankfully left no one hurt.
At Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport (IST), a taxiing Royal Air Maroc Boeing 787-8 (registration CN-RGT) struck a stationary Turkish Airlines Boeing 777-300ER (registration TC-JJZ), slicing through the Turkish aircraft’s tail cone.
Closed-circuit video caught the incident on film:
According to early reports, the 2-year-old Royal Air Maroc 787 pushed back around 5:37pm local time and was heading down taxiway Alpha toward the runway when it hit the stationary Turkish Airlines aircraft. The Turkish 777 had arrived at the gate approximately 25 minutes earlier after operating Turkish flight TK12 from New York's Kennedy (JFK). It's unclear if any passengers were on board the Turkish Airlines flight.
Photos posted on Twitter of the aftermath show the damage done to the Turkish 777 was quite substantial:
If this incident sounds similar, Turkish Airlines was the unfortunate casualty of another accident in Istanbul just a couple of months ago. In that incident, a taxiing Asiana Airlines Airbus A330 struck a stationary Turkish Airlines Airbus A321-200 tearing off the Turkish aircraft’s vertical stabilizer and causing "severe structural damage" to the aircraft.
If there's something systematic wrong with IST, there's an end in sight to the issues. On October 29, 2018, the airport code IST will move 22 miles away to a newly-built airport — dubbed simply the Istanbul New Airport.
May 2018 seemed to be especially bad for ground collisions. In addition to the Asiana A330 tearing off the tail off a Turkish Airlines A321 in Istanbul, a Primera Air struck a Ryanair aircraft in London, an Aer Lingus plane scraped against a pole in San Francisco and a truck slammed into a Southwest plane in Baltimore.
