PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - JetBlue plane tips backward at JFK Airport gate after ‘shift in weight and balance'
Old 31st Oct 2023, 11:02
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Ivor_Bigunn
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: switzerland
Posts: 48
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Well, the good old Daily Mail had some additional information. I have hilited the most interesting bits in Red.

I don't know how accurate any of it is.

"Passenger shows the terrifying moment from inside JetBlue plane as it TIPPED backward at JFK.

TikToker Sinead Bovell was among more than 100 passengers getting off the Airbus A321 from Barbados as its nose tilted into the air
JetBlue blames a 'shift in weight and balance during deplaning'

A passenger on board a JetBlue plane at New York's JFK has shared footage of its terrified passengers after it tipped backwards as they got off leaving its nose in the air.

TikToker Sinead Bovell was among more than 100 passengers aboard the Airbus A321-231 as it touched down after a four-and-a-half hour flight from Barbados on Monday evening.

They were disembarking through an air bridge at the front of the plane when the nose suddenly lurched into the air and its tail smacked onto the tarmac.

'I was seated maybe three quarters the way back into the plane,' Bovell told her followers.

'And when just over half the plane exited, or maybe a little bit more, the plane abruptly tipped backwards so quickly and so intensely that the tail of the plane hit the pavement of the jet bridge and part of the door broke.'

Her video records an airline stewardess ordering passengers around the stricken aircraft in an apparent bid to right it.

'Very slowly, little by little, move towards the middle of the airplane, cause apparently everything is like it tipped up,' she tells them.

The airline blamed a 'shift in weight and balance during deplaning', and sharp-eyed travel bloggers noticed the front cargo doors already open while passengers in the rear seats had yet to exit.

Her video records an airline stewardess ordering passengers around the stricken aircraft in an apparent bid to right it.

Frightened passengers struggled to stay upright as the plane see-sawed on its back wheels

'We had to strategically exit the plane two rows at a time, take a break, two rows at a time, take a break,'
Bovell told her followers on TikTok

No injuries were reported aboard the eight-year-old plane which had just finished its four-and-a-half hour flight from the Caribbean.

And industry experts said that such incidents are not uncommon when aircraft have been badly loaded.

'Luggage is seemingly being removed through the forward cargo door, so maybe a lot of weight had already been removed there, while there was a significant amount of cargo in the rear,' suggested travel blog website onemileatatime.com.

'Passengers disembark front to back, so perhaps passengers weren't moving forward that quickly.

'This was probably the perfect storm in terms of having too much cargo and passenger weight in the back of the aircraft, while not having enough cargo and passenger weight in the front of the aircraft.' "



I am not sure about luggage already being removed from the forward hold, as it does not look like that in the photos, but perhaps that entire operation was finished?

And the TikTok video is not really interesting because it is taken 100% inside the plane, so no sense of tilting is seen at all.

IB


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