All flights are back to normal Friday morning after an emergency maintenance incident grounded a flight out of BWI Airport.
An eyewitnesses at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport said he was sitting at his gate waiting for a flight when he saw a plane's nose hit the ground.
Nose gear of my plane collapsed pulling out of the gate at BWI. #bwi #southwest #nose #gear #nosegear pic.twitter.com/tsIiuOrqsY
— Ryan Michaels (@GroceryWonder) August 5, 2016
Leslie Winston was waiting to board a flight for Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, at gate A-11, when he heard a loud rumbling, he said. When he looked up, he saw that a Southwest Airlines plane had partially fallen, with its nose on the ground.
Southwest Airlines said a plane headed for Atlanta experienced a failure of a nose gear just after leaving the gate. They issued the following statement Thursday night:
Southwest Airlines reported an aircraft departing Baltimore/Washington (BWI) this evening experienced a failure of a nose gear just after pushing back from the departure gate. No reports of injuries among the 126 passengers and five crew. The passengers are being accommodated on another aircraft for their flight to Atlanta. The approximate delay from the original departure is four hours. The aircraft will be inspected by our technical operations team. There is no other impact to flights to and from BWI.
Yikes @BWI_Airport #BWI pic.twitter.com/tYF7MugzBw
— Winston Leslie (@winnie_4567) August 5, 2016
Winston told ABC2 News that a pilot told him that the front brake of the plane had collapsed. Winston also said he saw emergency personnel respond to the scene within seconds.
Just after 10:10 p.m., BWI officials announced that all passengers were off the disabled plane.
Further #BWI update -- all passengers are now off the disabled aircraft and in terminal.
— BWI Marshall Airport (@BWI_Airport) August 5, 2016
"I gotta hand it to BWI and Southwest," Winston said, for how they handled the situation and quickly moved customers to a different gate.
Winston said that before he changed gates, he had not yet seen anyone come off of the plane.
.@southwest plane accident tonight at BWI Nose gear goes out? pic.twitter.com/TMNEQOiCTv
— JulianVasquezHeilig (@ProfessorJVH) August 5, 2016
Jonathan Dean, the manager of communications with BWI, said that there were no injuries reported.
"The airline is working to disembark its passengers at the gate," Dean said in an email. "There is no overall impact to airline operations."
Officials with Anne Arundel County Fire officials said they were a part of the response and that the call came in around 9:10 p.m.
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