United Airlines: Passengers evacuated after plane rolls off runway and gets stuck in grass
Passengers had to be evacuated from a United Airlines plane after it rolled off a Houston airport runway and then got lodged in the grass.
No injuries were reported among the 160 passengers and six crew members as photos showed the plane tilted to one side with one of its wings near the ground.
The flight 2477 had just landed at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport at around 8am on Friday after flying from Memphis, Tennessee.
Stairs were brought to the plane and the crew helped all passengers safely leave, United said in a statement.
The airline did not immediately say what caused the plane to veer off the runway. The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating.
The statement read: “All passengers have been bused to the terminal and are being assisted by our team with their onward connections and other needs.
“We are removing luggage from the aircraft and will work to reunite customers with their belongings as quickly as possible.
“We will work with the NTSB, FAA and Boeing to understand what happened.”
On Thursday, another United Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Los Angeles when a jetliner bound for Japan lost a tyre while taking off from San Francisco. No injuries were reported.
Video footage showed the plane losing one of the six tyres on its left-side main landing gear assembly only seconds after takeoff.
The tyre landed in an employee parking lot at San Francisco International Airport, where it smashed into a car and shattered the back window before breaking through a fence and coming to stop in a neighboring lot.
Earlier in the week, a United flight from Houston to Fort Myers, Texas, was forced to turn around Monday after one of the plane's engines caught fire. Several of the 167 passengers aboard the Boeing 737 took videos showing a line of flames shooting out of the engine. No injuries were reported.