passenger plane has collapsed onto a tow truck at Manchester Airport.
 

A taxiing passenger plane has collapsed onto a tow truck at Manchester Airport.

The dramatic moment left the plane's nose resting on the roof of the truck’s cab, which has been pushed forward by the impact.

Firefighters and other emergency services were scrambled to the scene this morning. Passengers bound for Barcelona were immediately escorted off.

http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/arti...er-airport.jpg

Plane at Manchester Airport collapses onto truck while being towed away - Mirror Online

From the photographic evidence in post No 1 alone, let us now try to see how many speculative causes we can postulate, in true PPRuNe tradition, before an obviously authoritative post emerges with the real reason.

They'll fall into two categories, I imagine; in the first it will be the aircraft that moved forwards while the tug didn't, and in the second the opposite. But why? There are so many possibilities!

Over to our usual experts.

Aircraft was being towed from Terminal Three over to the 60's due to it's slot, standard procedure for 'push n park' at MAN.

Sheer pins went on the tow bar during the tow, tug driver tried to slow down but the head of the tow bar disconnected from the bar itself. Result of this was the aircraft running over the tug.

Importantly the tug driver walked away okay :ok:

While full of passengers? Sounds rather a strange procedure.

T3 at that time of day is very busy so yes they do move aircraft if pax on but missed slot
but don`t know if it happened in this case

Why?..........

Push and Park.

I'd take it as you have a slot.

Some one else needs your parking stand.

You push off the stand with your passengers, engines shut down.

Park somewhere ATC wants you to park.

When your slot time comes, start your engines.

Eventually take off with tug disconnected.

Guess the tug driver was going too fast and broke the shear pin....Damn

Thanks for the responses - you live and learn. :O

Here's where it's documented:

http://www.magworld.co.uk/magweb.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/Aerodrome_Manual_2015_V2_Sep.pdf/$FILE/Aerodrome_Manual_2015_V2_Sep.pdf

Pages 227-229.

Push n Park is common practise at MAN, and I think the airport are setting up a few more 'push n park' stands over the summer.

There's a few benefits to pushing and parking, but the main ones are that it frees up a contact stand that's usually required for another flight, and it allows the aircraft to taxi straight out to the runway when it reaches it's slot time rather than wait for a tug crew to come back, who may not come back, leading to it missing its slot :ok:

Or as some do to say they have departed on time

The real question here is why did the shear pins go?

All this greet and meet or valet parking does not really explain how the tow ended up wedged under the nose of the aircraft. For all we know the driver may simply have stuck it in reverse, anyway that`s what I`d say.

<<While full of passengers? Sounds rather a strange procedure.>>

Used to happen all day at Heathrow Dave. You must remember?

Saw one shear on a DC-10 push-back. A member of ground crew failed to install NG steering bypass valve pin.

No, in my time at Heathrow I don't recall an aircraft ever being towed from one stand to another while full of passengers, which is what we're talking about here.

Why didn't the tug driver simply advise the crew, who would've then stopped and parked the brakes?

Standard proc all over Europe nowadays. It's not about moving an aircraft from "one stand to another", it's about freeing up a gate for a new arrival / departure as often gate space is limited, not parking positions.

The Boeing 787 could be a problem for this procedure as I believe it cannot start the engines without an external power source such as FEGP or GPU. Or maybe that was just peculiar to the 3rd prototype which we handled on a sales trip?

I've had shear pins fail a handful of times, but not all at once. Nothing was unusual at the time, so evidently they just wear out and shear under normal loads unless inspected and replaced on a proper schedule. I put it down to lack of maintenance by the ground handling companies.

Look at all the money they saved by not running the engines.....