Boeing reports latest safety incident after plane’s nose wheel falls off during Atlanta take-off

Plane’s nose gear ‘popped off and rolled down the hill’ when Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off for Bogota in Colombia

A Boeing 757 passenger jet operated by Delta Air Lines lost its nose wheel as the plane was lining up to take off from Atlanta’s international airport on Saturday.

The nose gear “popped off and rolled down the hill” when Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off for Bogota in Colombia, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) notice filed on Monday.

The report noted that none of the 184 passengers or six crew members were injured during the incident at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

“One of your nose tires just came off,” a controller is heard alerting the pilot, according to the air traffic control audio included in the FAA report, according to ABC news. “It just rolled off the runway behind you.”

It landed on the south side of the runway, according to the outlet citing the details of the FAA report.

The passengers were boarded on a separate flight, reported The New York Times, quoting a Delta spokesperson.

Boeing did not immediately issue a statement on the incident. The FAA told the newspaper it was continuing its investigation of the incident.

The incident comes amid heightened scrutiny of the aircraft manufacturer by federal regulators following the mid-air blowout of a fuselage panel that left a gaping hold in an eight-week-old Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet flown by Alaska Airlines.

Alaska Airlines has found loose bolts on several of its models of the plane earlier this month and cancelled hundreds of flights after the FAA announced that it would be grounding Boeing 737 Max 9s for inspection.

Boeing has been at the centre of two fatal crashes in recent years. In October 2018, a faulty sensor on a Max 8 jet activated an anti-stall system that caused a plane to crash near Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. The following year, another Max 8 operating under Ethiopian Airlines crashed, resulting in the deaths of 157 people.

Additional reporting by agencies