Pilot praised after touching down successfully at Mandalay despite failure of landing gear

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Myanmar pilot saved the day after his aircraft’s landing gear failed, safely putting the jet on the runway with no front wheels on Sunday, an official said.

The touchdown – in which no one was hurt – was the second instance of a malfunctioning flight in Myanmar in less than a week.

Myanmar National Airlines flight UB-103 – an Embraer-190 model – was carrying 82 passengers and a crew of seven when it touched the ground at about 9am in Mandalay, a city popular with foreign tourists.

An unverified video circulated on social media showed a graceful landing before the plane’s nose dipped gradually to the runway, and the craft slowly ground to a halt.

Ye Htut Aung, deputy director general of Myanmar’s civil aviation department, said the pilot tried repeatedly to deploy the front landing gear – first through its computer system, then manually.

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“They tried hard twice by flying around twice and asked [the flight tower] to check whether the nose wheel dropped or not,” Ye Htut Aung said, calling it a “technical fault”.

“So they had to land with the back wheels ... The pilot could land it skilfully,” he said. “There were no casualties.”

Ye Htut Aung said engineers sent by Myanmar National Airlines would examine the aircraft, adding that all jets had a daily flight check.

For its part, Embraer said in a statement it was “offering its full cooperation to the aviation authorities in order to aid in the investigation”.

Passenger Soe Moe said: “Smoke came out a little when we landed ... All passengers are OK.”

Sunday’s incident came just four days after a Biman Bangladesh Airlines plane skidded off a runway while landing at Yangon airport in a storm, injuring 11 passengers.

Myanmar’s monsoon season has caused problems for commercial and military flights in the past.

A military plane crashed into the Andaman Sea in 2017, killing all 122 people on board in one of the deadliest aviation accidents in the country’s history. Authorities blamed bad weather.

In 2015, an Air Bagan passenger plane veered off the runway amid bad weather and heavy rain. A passenger and a person on the ground were killed.