Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/lufthansa-787-jet-suffers-front-wheel-collapse-frankfurt-gate-2026-06-04/

by karakoram • 2 months ago

74 82 2 months ago

reuters.com

jaydenmilne• 2 months ago

That’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point

binaryturtle2• 2 months ago

I duckduckgo'ed "nose gear collapse" earlier and it seems it may be an issue that's more common than expected? At least there were lots of images of airplanes with broken front wheels and the nose touching the floor.

dragontamer2• 2 months ago

This is a joke about "The Front Fell Off", a classic comedy video from a few decades ago.

dust422• 2 months ago

From the picture and the text this aircraft was parked at the gate. During a hard landing the nose gear may collapse but not while being parked. And while parked there are protections to prevent retraction. However, these can be overridden by maintenance.

dragontamer2• 2 months ago

Well this time it at least didn't fall into the environment.

sigmoid10• 2 months ago

Can someone tell me if this is just confirmation bias or is Boeing really going down this hard? I mean management was obviously tanking since the McDonnell Douglas takeover, but did it really take almost 30 years for this to shine through? Or were these things underreported in the last decades?

timw4mail• 2 months ago

Confirmation bias, instant communication, hyper focus on Boeing mishaps, etc.

ak217• 2 months ago

The 777 and 787 programs have never seen a passenger fatality resulting from an engineering defect. That is a monumental achievement in light of the passenger miles served. Boeing has its problems, but that record speaks for itself

dust422• 2 months ago

This and we don't know yet what happened. It could have structurally collapsed - very unlikely, it could have uncommanded retracted, or maintenance has overridden the protections. I'd place my bets on #3, handling error in maintenance mode.

hulitu2• 2 months ago

From 787 wikipedia page: "On June 12, 2025, Air India Flight 171, an 11-year-old Boeing 787-8 registered as VT-ANB[398] operating from Ahmedabad Airport to London Gatwick Airport, crashed into the hostel building of B. J. Medical College shortly after takeoff. According to the preliminary Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau report released on July 8, 2025, the crash was caused by both engines shutting down after their fuel control switches moved from the "RUN" to "CUTOFF" position.[399]: 13–14 The cause of the switch movement remains under investigation. The report did not recommend any actions to Boeing, or 787 operators.[400][399]: 15 All but one of the 242 people on board were killed, as well as 19 people on the ground.[401] The sole survivor was a British national "

Aloha• 2 months ago

Another thing I'd point out is how often planes regularly fell out of the sky as recently as 40 years ago - my first flight 32 years ago or so, they still had kiosks in the airport to sell you life insurance.

Even with the MAX and the recent (last ~2 years) spate of incidents, flying is safer now than it ever has been, and certainly safer than it has been over its lifetime.

x86cherry• 2 months ago

Commercial air traffic has increased ~400% since 1990 [0], do you feel that number reflects the increase in reporting?

0. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

The 1997 McDonnell Douglas acquisition led to their arrogant management culture replacing Boeing's, represented symbolically by the reference to The Economist cover September 10th-16th 1994 of camels fucking.

There have been many other safety defects and scandals swept under the rug, but they rarely make the news because they're detailed and complicated and corporate "news" isn't interested. Also, US presidents have defended them and US regulators run PR interference for them too.

The biggest one is the fact that unknowable 737 NG -6xx/-7xx/-8xx/-9xx structural fuselage elements including bear straps manufactured grossly out of spec by subcontractor Ducommun, declared "airworthy", and pounded into place on the Boeing fuselage assembly line on orders of management present greater risks of fuselage breakup during severe turbulence, runway overruns, and hard landings. There have already been fuselage breakups of NG airframes that 737 Classic aircraft survived more intact in similar circumstances. Most worryingly, there has been extensive retaliation against whistleblowers.

https://christinenegroni.com/boeing-workers-warn-of-737-ng-s...

vr462• 2 months ago

"If it's Boeing, we ain't goin'"

_DeadFred_• 2 months ago

I used to bring up issues in good faith regarding Boeing because it needs to improve. But it seems like HN is taking out anti-Americanism sentiment and a bit of Euro pro-Airbus, so I kinda stopped because it went from productive to attempts to create a false narrative.

rainsford• 2 months ago

It's mostly, but not entirely, a combination of biases working in a feedback loop. Because of the 737 MAX crashes, which were legitimately at least partially Boeing's fault, stories about incidents involving Boeing planes are more likely to get covered in the media and become popular on social media, essentially selection bias. Confirmation bias means both the media and readers are more likely to view it the new story as Boeing's fault whether or not that's accurate, and this first impression becomes solidified in peoples' minds, anchoring bias.

This is very important because aircraft accident investigations take time and few aviation incidents generate enough attention that there is much if any follow up once the full cause is known. This first impression is what people remember the next time there is a Boeing story, further strengthening the confirmation bias. It's a self reinforcing feedback loop.

Which is not to say that Boeing doesn't deserve some bad press. The MAX story, the door plug blowout, and some others are legitimate evidence of issues at Boeing. But the bias feedback loop ensures that every Boeing story is treated that way, significantly distorting the reality of the issue.

midiguy• 2 months ago

So a plane which has withstood probably countless landings, had its nose gear collapse while sitting statically at a gate of all times and places? Weird.

rjsw2• 2 months ago

One post said that the plane was only 4 months old.

joezydeco• 2 months ago

https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/boeing-787-9-d-abpq-l...

rconti• 2 months ago

Okay, countable landings.

red_admiral• 2 months ago

There's a story that during the testing of a fighter plane - I think the F-35 but not sure - the "developers" claimed the new computer systems made most pilot errors all but impossible.

QA engineer's first check was, what happens if I try and retract the wheels while the plane is sitting on the ground and not moving. Oops.

rjsw2• 2 months ago

There are plenty of older planes with "retract wheels automatically when airborne" buttons that work by detecting a reduction in pressure on the wheels. There are also plenty of runways with slight bumps in them. The two do not work well together.

866-RON-0-FEZ3• 2 months ago

The video looks more like the gear was intentionally retracted.

dlcarrier3• 2 months ago

This is the third time in three years that a nose gear has collapsed while stopped or moving slowly: https://avherald.com/h?article=52292bd1 https://avherald.com/h?article=51816daf

Each time has been on different aircraft models, but there's not a lot of variation in nose wheel retraction design on airliners. There's a myriad of ways something could go wrong to make it happen, but considering how many flights there are per day, it's still an extremely rare event.

sourcegrift• 2 months ago

The only reason boeing exists today is because they've paid off Trump

focusgroup0• 2 months ago

Given that it's their turf, is it reasonable to consider sabotage by an Airbus-affiliated entity?

heyitsguay• 2 months ago

It was the same sniper that blew up that Starship

creaturemachine• 2 months ago

And New Glenn. This guy gets around!

vr462• 2 months ago

About as likely as the repairman getting lost in Frankfurt Airport

netsharc5• 2 months ago

"reasonable"...

How insane do you want to sound?

"Yeah, let's sabotage a competitor's plane, I'm sure it won't cause a major scandal and millions of dollars of lawsuits if one of them falls out of the sky and kills ~300 people, and they caught us as the cause...".

What the hell dictionary are you using where you're asking if the word "reasonable" could apply to this idea? Is your hovercraft full of eels?

bell-cot• 2 months ago

Collapsed while it was sitting at a gate, with no passengers yet on board - meaning the the gear was under far lower loads than during a landing.

While slowly-failing gear could have collapsed anyway just then, the obvious question is whether the nose gear had just been serviced. By mechanics who (say) forgot to re-install the bolts holding everything together.

cwizou2• 2 months ago

Same thing happened to British Airways a few years ago on a 787, a misplaced security pin that was inserted in the wrong place during a maintenance operation. There are two very similar holes next to one another that can receive the pin, there's a picture at the bottom here : https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/318989

Wondering if the same mishap is behind it again.

wvbdmp2• 2 months ago

Yikes, mojibake in 2021.

edit: actually, how did that happen? The apostrophes show up correctly, they’re just all preceded by a Â that doesn’t seem to represent anything?

netsharc5• 2 months ago

They're probably Microsoft's "Smart Quotes", which are Unicode. They were presumably stored in UTF-8 but retrieved as ASCII (or ISO-8859-1).

layer83• 2 months ago

The page is declared as ISO 8859-1, but the actual bytes of the text appear to be UTF-8. In UTF-8, characters from U+0080 to U+00AF happen to be encoded as C2 <codepoint value>. For example, U+0092 is encoded as C2 92.

C2 in ISO 8859-1 is ”Â”. U+0092 is the control code Private Use 2 in Unicode, and 92 is the same in ISO 8859-1. However, the standard Western Windows code page 1252 extends ISO 8859-1 by assigning “’” (right single quotation mark) to 92.

HTML5/WHATWG requires an ISO 8859-1 charset declaration to be interpreted as Windows-1252 (https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-character-encodin...), hence the displayed result is “Â’”.

The original Windows-1252 content must have previously been converted to UTF-8 under the assumption that the source is ISO 8859-1, i.e. mapping 92 to U+0092 (Private Use 2) instead of to U+2019 (Right Single Quotation Mark). The resulting UTF-8 encoding was placed in the web page, which however is declared as ISO 8859-1.

stefan_2• 2 months ago

The report on that incident says there was a hardware modification to make this impossible, to be incorporated before Jan 2023.

(It also says this happened to Boeing in 2018 and they ignored it, of course)

cwizou2• 2 months ago

I missed that part, and since it's a newly delivered plane (this January), it's safe to assume the mitigation was in place. Preliminary report will be interesting here.

dheera2• 2 months ago

Wonder why they don't just grab a huge permanent Sharpie and write in huge letters "Do not insert pin here" on one hole and "Insert pin here" on the other hole.

I'm actually serious, it seems to me they resist these kind of short-term helpers that would save lots of injuries.

netsharc5• 2 months ago

The aircraft is 1 year old and was delivered in January...

But, fucking hell, apparently Boeing "engineers" are so dumb they never learned about Murphy's law.

866-RON-0-FEZ3• 2 months ago

I bet you would blame the automotive engineers too after reversing your car through the garage door.

QuiEgo• 2 months ago

I’d be far more likely to suspect Boeing’s management for pushing unsafe schedule or staffing and having things slip through the cracks. They have a reputation.

thedrbrian• 2 months ago

Anyone who has any mechanical inkling would see that the NLG rotates around the massive bushing and putting a pin in there won’t stop anything.

root-parent5• 2 months ago

Not yet at the https://avherald.com/

Scoundreller• 2 months ago

you were a half hour too impatient: https://avherald.com/h?article=53a14f7c&opt=0

root-parent5• 2 months ago

Thanks.

root-parent5• 2 months ago

No reason to downvote. The reason is because incidents on avherald get many times lots of comments both from professional pilots as well as mechanics.

This one even better: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1510091&...

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1twkg45/lufthansa...

Video: https://x.com/flightradar24/status/2062510866981924920?s=20

Havoc• 2 months ago

I don't understand how that caused several injuries among a pretty small group (staff)?

Google says front wheel is about 1.68m. High but not crazy high. Plane body and people fall at same speed and it would be slower than actual freefall since the plane is vaguely balance-ish on rear wheels

I'm sure the reporting is right but feels counterintuitive to me

root-parent5• 2 months ago

If you are inside the cabin and not expecting, would be sliding down quite a bit.

Insanity• 2 months ago

+1. And honestly you can injure yourself pretty badly by just falling down. Especially if you’re a bit older.

connorbrinton• 2 months ago

My uneducated guess is that crew members in the back galley could have been injured by unsecured items they were loading falling or sliding. The service cart itself is 200-250 lbs. With the rear galley accelerating upward, then a sudden halt to the acceleration when the front nose impacts the ground, I could imagine the cart lifting off the ground and landing on feet or legs. Or putting the cart aside, other items such as drink cans, galley appliances, etc. falling from cabinets or counters could cause injury

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

Because the tow guy called in the problem 10min prior and the mechanics were clustered around it deciding it it was a "get a new plane" sized problem and they did something and dropped it or whatever. Someone's hand got mashed, someone got bonked on the head and the boss spilled his coffee. Meanwhile inside the cabin whoever was febreezing vomit off the wall of the bathroom reached out to grab anything that was nearby when the plane lurched which turned out to be his coworker's ass and the fake nail grazed his eye when he got slapped for that. Some asshole manager probably slipped and fell rushing to chew them all out. And another guy got a bloody nose when he crashed his baggage tractor into a parked forklift at at 3mph because he was watching the whole deal rather than where he was going but he didn't report that one so he's not included in the total.

Yeah I'm pulling all that out my ass but I bet I'm closer than anyone around here wants me to be. However mundane and stupid you think ground ops are at an airport triple that and you'll be in the ballpark.

cryo32• 2 months ago

Yep. My brother was ground ops at Stansted. Knocked himself out cold falling over a traffic cone he just put out.

He's now an estate agent. Must have been the concussion.

bgirard• 2 months ago

A ground level fall can be fatal for a senior. Throw in freak accident factors and other vulnerable demographics it's not very surprising to me.

dlcarrier3• 2 months ago

I have relatives that work in the industry. There's liability reasons why staff regularly get taken to a hospital and evaluated, for the most minor things. If it were full of passengers boarding, there'd likely be more staff injuries reported than passenger injuries, despite the latter group being an order of magnitude larger.

pimlottc• 2 months ago

There may have also been additional ground crew on board the plane for changeover duties (cleaners, catering staff, etc)

ortusdux• 2 months ago

Video (reddit) - https://www.reddit.com/r/aviationmaintenance/comments/1twmd2...

LegitStupid• 2 months ago

"Lufthansa operates the 787-9 variant" and "is planning to gradually phase out less efficient jets and simplify its fleet." Do the efficiencies come from not having to burn fuel for it to crash into the ground?

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 months ago

https://avherald.com/h?article=53a14f7c&opt=0

Several injured in Boeing 787 nose-gear collapse in Frankfurt

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