Tag Archives: aircraft

United Boeing 767 Gets Hosed

Now I know the rest of the story.

This week one of our friendly airline geeks on a list I am on sent out some disturbing pictures in which it appeared someone at United AIrlines decided to take a pressure washer to one of the airline’s Boeing 767s — knocking out windows and generally making a huge expensive mess.

But that wasn’t a pressure washing. It was from fire hoses.

Kieran Daly wrote on his blog, Unusual Attitude this week that he was told that United took a Boeing 767-300, and gave it the full customer-facing treatment. New seats, interior fittings, and best of all,”Panasonic’s all-singing, all-dancing in-flight entertainment.” All of this was done at its Chicago maintenance base.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

If you would like to read the official MX write-up of the damage, you can access it at Kieran’s blog. It runs for pages and pages. And pages.

Closer Than We Want to Be to Continental Airlines’s Flight 1404 Wreckage

One of the more unfortunate news items while we were on holiday hiatus was the crash of Continental Airlines‘ Flight 1404, which apparently tried to take off from Denver International, but instead found itself careening off the runway, ending up in a ravine on the edge of the airport. Minus one engine and its landing gear. And on fire.

While we all saw photos of the wreckage in the days after the mishap on Dec. 20, and while I think most of us were amazed that everyone onboard had escaped — when you look at this slide show posted by Denver Channel 7 News, you’ll be even more amazed that there were not more casualties.

Warning: These are powerful images.