"A little speed tape will fix most anything."
thread creep maybe, but in the 70s operating into Bucharest under Ceaucescu communist rule, things were pretty basic and life not very pleasant. We were just boarding pax (bussed out to stairs) when the aircraft - a DH Groundgripper - lurched briefly side to side with a pronounced clunk audible.
I went to the fwd door in time to see a forklift truck disappearing round the corner of a building, towing a baggage trolley. Passengers said it had run into us. The trailing edge of the port inboard flap by the hold door had a V-shaped dent about a foot wide by 8 inches deep. The skin was all squeezed up into ridges about 4 ins high.
As we didn't have local staff we carried an additional ground engineer on these flights. We ran the flaps out to see if there was damage to the mechanism and the Eng and I went to try to talk to LHR engineering and ops by phone (not easy in those days). Fortunately the F/O kept an eye on things and stopped another pair of loaders trying to whack it all back flat with a pair of sledgehammers. We also by coincidence had a passenger who was a PanAm structures engineer who volunteered to help us out.
In the end we borrowed a hacksaw and cut out the damaged bit, secured the loose skin edges with some cardboard some and nuts and bolts from the local agent's car and speed-taped it over, with phone OK from London to fly back at Captain's discretion.
All the pax had been watching this Heath Robinson repair work with great interest. I offered them the choice of flying back with us or staying the night in Bucharest for a replacement aircraft could get there. No takers for that so they all flew back happily in our patched up aircraft. Never heard anything more about it. Good stuff, that speed tape.