SAS drops MD-80 to the floor

[md80forum]

A Spanair MD-80 has reportedly fallen off its jacks during maintenance with SAS in Copenhagen two or three weeks ago. After viewing scrapping the plane altogether, the damages exceeding 4M Euro are now being patched by a team from Boeing. The reason for this peculiar hard landing is speculated to be corrosion, wrong jacking or insufficient balancing of the nose during jacking. SAS has transferred one of its parked MD-80's to Spanair as compensation. My source is senior maintenance with an airline.

Which reminds me of the flying circus guy and wing-walker from the early days of aviation, who toured America hanging under biplanes from his teeth and his hair, but then died when he fell off a bar stool.

Jan-Erik Andelin
MD-80 International Forum
www.md80.net

[alatriste]

There are two SAS MD-80 flying for Spanair.

[Scimitar]

Did SAS drop two then?!

[alatriste]

No just one, but BIG BOSS realised that few MD 80 were available and decided to ask for another one for summer season.

[Golden Rivet]

My worst nightmare when jacking the big stuff - be interesting to hear if anyone has any other stories of aircraft falling off main jacks.

100 tonnes sitting on 3 jack points a couple of inches in diameter -always looks like an accident waiting to happen.

[Witraz]

In my youth I used to watch retraction checks on B720's. Probably the most spectacular being the Emergency Gear Extention, watching the undercarraige free fall knocking the gear doors out the way, the whole aircraft suddering on the jacks, expecting it to collapase at any moment. I have often wondered what the same scene is like with a B747

[Anti Skid On]

Call me naive but, don't they attach cables to the wings (I was told that on the old BAC1-11's there were two eyelets (for want of a better word) that a cable could be attached to for lifting purposes, and I would have thought that structurally (and load wish) this would be possible. Also, in the event of the jack breaking you had some safety.

[jafa]

It's happened before alright. The one I saw, one of the flying bits of jack caught up with a fleeing mechanic and put him in hospital for along time.

[ubreakemifixem]

We at big airways regulary jack aircraft for troubleshooting and swings.I am always a little scared when we jack a B747 or B777 but with good placement of jacks and good teamwork it has always been a good and awesome experience.Pictures incuded of a recent B777 jacking.http://

[ozplane]

Didn't East African drop a VC-10 at Embakasi years ago. Apparently it needed a complete new engine bearer frame which must have been expensive as it was machined out of the solid.
Perhaps a RAF engineer might know about it as that was where they ended up.