lomapaseo - As BeachBum said, Jan. 1 incident wasn't just a wing scrape, it was a landing gear collapse that injured (at the latest count) three pax, at least two of whom were taken to hospital. Subsequent inspection on the rest of the fleet revealed cracks in the main gear of one other aircraft. The bird with the broken leg is ``not written off - yet'' JAS said yesterday, but given that they're no longer counting it in the fleet numbers they're giving the press now, you've got to suspect it's in a pretty bad way.
This problem may well be totally unrelated to the engine cracks, but you've got to ask yourself how come this is all happening at once, and only to JAS? SAS said yesterday it has no intention of grounding its fleet of MDs ...
JAS now saying it wants to lease JT8s from Pratt to replace the damaged engines, though they don't think there'll be enough available to get the whole fleet operational again any time soon.
Will be interesting to see if any similar problems turn up in anyone else's MD fleet, or is something wrong with the way JAS maintains these aeroplanes?