Landing gear punched into Southwest 737 jet on landing, NTSB says

The landing gear didn’t just collapse when a Southwest Airlines jet touched down in New York City and plunged nose-first into the tarmac: The landing gear punched into the plane itself as it skidded for almost half a mile.

The new revelations came Tuesday as the National Transportation Safety Board continued to investigate its second major landing accident by a Boeing jetliner in three weeks.

Officials said 10 people were injured, none seriously, during the Monday evening landing. The Boeing 737-700, arriving at LaGuardia Airport from Nashville, was carrying 143 passengers and six crew members.

When the plane touched down, the 737’s nose gear collapsed up and into the jet’s fuselage, NTSB officials said in a series of messages from the board’s official Twitter account.

A photograph showed part of the landing gear penetrating the electronics bay that houses avionics equipment inside the fuselage.

The NTSB said only the right axle of the landing gear was still attached. It offered no further detail on what might have gone wrong.

After the plane touched down and the gear collapsed, the jetliner slid 2,175 feet on its nose along the runway before coming to a stop off the right side of the runway, the NTSB said.

An Asiana Airlines jet that crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport on July 6 was a Boeing 777 that came in too low while landing; three passengers were killed in that crash, during which some of the plane’s emergency slides accidentally deployed inside the aircraft.

NTSB officials said the 737’s slides deployed normally after the incident Monday. The runway at LaGuardia has since reopened.

The Boeing 737 is the world’s best-selling aircraft, and it is the only type of jet Southwest flies. Boeing builds the jet in Renton, Wash., and has delivered more than 7,600 of the planes since 1967.

The aircraft has run into minimal safety issues. In April 2011, a Southwest 737 made an emergency landing after a 5-foot-by-1-foot section of fuselage burst open on a flight from Phoenix to Sacramento. Afterward, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered U.S. airlines to inspect their older and most heavily used Boeing 737s for fuselage cracks.

Times staff writers Tina Susman and W.J. Hennigan contributed to this report.

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