January 10-2014
A Saudi Arabian Airlines plane carrying hundreds of Iranian pilgrims from Mashhad made an emergency landing in Medina Sunday when the pilot could not get part of the landing gear to go down.
The airline said 29 people were injured, with 17 treated at the airport and released and the other 12 hospitalized, three of whom were in serious condition. But the next day, Iran’s Hajj Organization said only one of the pilgrims, an 82-year-old woman, remained in the hospital.
The Boeing 767 made at least two attempts at landing before the pilot gave up trying to get the right rear wheels to deploy and made an emergency landing.
Video showed a vast array of sparks as the plane skidded down the runway to a stop. The video looked like flames, but there was no fire when the plane came to a halt. The aircraft did not leave the runway.
Problems with landing gears are not uncommon but there are rarely any injuries when the aircraft does not leave the runway. United Press International said the injuries did not occur from the landing but while the plane was being evacuated after it came to a halt, suggesting there was a panic among the passengers.
That same day, human body parts fell from the sky on Jeddah, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) south of Medina. City police said they appeared to have come from someone trapped in the landing gear of a plane flying overhead. But the police discounted any connection with the emergency landing at Medina.
The falling body parts were reported about 2:30 a.m. Sunday while the emergency landing came about dawn. It wasn’t immediately known if the pilgrim flight went over Jeddah before landing at Medina. Jeddah is directly south of Medina while a flight from Mashhad would normally be coming from the northeast.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Authority said it would send a representative to Saudi Arabia to study the defective landing gear, insisting that it had a legal right to probe an accident involving a foreign aircraft in a foreign country since the passengers on the plane were Iranian.
The chartered hajj aircraft was carrying 299 passengers from Mashhad and had a crew of 16.
