In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to worry about pieces of your jetliner falling off during takeoff.
But we don’t live in that world .
With Boeing planes losing tires , door plugs , and engine covers midair more often than one would hope, you may be wondering how serious the problem really is. KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman posed that question to commercial airline pilot Laura Einsettler.
“In the case of larger airlines like this, each landing gear truck, as we call them, has several wheels on them, usually anywhere from four wheels to six wheels,” she said. “So one wheel falling off, out of those, that amount, is just kind of a non-event, really.”
Einsettler said that losing a wheel “obviously shouldn’t happen,” but it’s fine from a safety perspective.
In the case of a United Airlines flight that lost a wheel while taking off from LAX on Monday, the plane was able to make it safely to its destination in Denver with no further problems. In March, another United Airlines plane lost a tire during takeoff in San Francisco and made a safe emergency landing at LAX.
As for why the wheels are falling off to begin with, Einsettler said that’s “something that’s going to need to be investigated so that it doesn’t ever happen again.”
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On Sunday, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to felony charges for two deadly crashes involving its beleaguered 737 Max jetliners in 2018 and 2019. The jet that lost a wheel on Monday was a 30-year-old Boeing 757, an older model that’s still flying for several airlines.
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