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A bird strike in an engine caused an emergency landing of a Condor flight in Fuerteventura

By

 André Orban

 -

8 January 2022

0

A Condor Boeing 757-300 had to make an emergency landing yesterday at the Fuerteventura airport after suffering a breakdown when a bird entered one of the two engines as soon as it took off from Lanzarote-César Manríque with destination Hamburg. The aircraft managed to land without major incident after even the inhabitants of Playa Honda saw flares and heard the roars coming from the fuselage.

The aircraft, a 23-year-old Boeing 757-330 with registration D-ABOB, took off from Arrecife at 13:58 on flight DE1439. Ahead of him was a four-and-a-half-hour flight to northern Germany. However, within seconds of being in the air, he suffered a failure in the right engine, as we reported in our forum yesterday.

The loud noise that was emitted alarmed people who were in the vicinity of the airport facility. Several witnesses who were at that time in the town of Güime (San Bartolomé) saw how “flares several times” came out of one of the engines, according to what they told this newspaper. “The noise was impressive“, which led the residents of this neighbourhood to leave their homes to see what was happening in the proximity of the flight over their homes. One of the passengers even recorded what happened during the takeoff. In the images, you can see more than a dozen flares in just ten seconds until the pilots stop the engine and cut off the fuel supply. The manager of the Lanzarote Emergency Consortium, Enrique Espinosa, told Televisión Canaria that the incident occurred when a bird entered the turbines.

As soon as they realised what had happened, the crew decided to change course to land as soon as possible and notified the control tower. The witnesses added that the plane did not even reach Montaña Mina and “turned at the height of the roundabout between Güime and Arrecife” to return to the airport of departure. However, the air traffic controllers ordered them to go to Fuerteventura airport.

As reported by the controllers themselves on their Twitter account, “probably” the option of landing in Maxorata was chosen because of the length of the runway, which is just over a kilometre longer than that of Lanzarote (3,405 meters by 2,400, respectively), although in both cases the allowed landing distance is the same (2,400). Other sources specified that it may also be due to the fact that Fuerteventura has fewer obstacles than Lanzarote, such as the presence of mountains in the vicinity, in case of a possible go-around to return to the air.

The operation was quick. Given the breakdown, the plane did not even burn the fuel it had in the tanks a more than four hours flight, and in a matter of 34 minutes the Boeing 757-330, which has a capacity of about 225 passengers, landed in Fuerteventura without any setback.

Source: La Provincia