SAS Grounds Q400 Fleet after Second Incident in 3 Days

By Chris Kjelgaard, Senior Editor

posted: 11 September 2007 11:18 pm ET

: SAS has grounded its fleet of 23 Bombardier Q400 turboprop regional airliners following a second landing incident in three days. The second incident, which occurred in the early hours of Wednesday, Sept. 12 at Vilnius Airport in Lithuania, followed an incident on Sunday, Sept. 10 in which an SAS Q400 suffered a main landing gear collapse on landing at Aalborg in Denmark. Nobody was seriously hurt in either incident. Credit: Bombardier Aerospace

Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has grounded its entire fleet of 23 Bombardier Q400 regional airliners with immediate effect after a second Q400 landing incident in three days.

An SAS Q400 turboprop regional airliner -- the latest member of Bombardier's popular Dash 8/Q Series family of turboprop regional airliners -- was involved in a landing incident at Vilnius Airport in Lithuania at 1:48 a.m. local time on Wednesday while operating the airline's flight SK2748 from Copenhagen to Palanga, also in Lithuania.

All of the 48 passengers and four crewmembers on board the Q400 evacuated the aircraft safely after landing, according to SAS spokesman Stefan Lonnqvist, speaking to Aviation.com from the airline's headquarters in Stockholm.

The accident came less than two days after a Q400 carrying 69 passengers and four crewmembers on SAS' flight SK1209 from the Danish capital Copenhagen to Aalborg, also in Denmark, was involved in a landing incident at 4:10 p.m. local time at Aalborg on Sunday. Five passengers were slightly injured during the evacuation of the aircraft on landing.

Prior to Sunday's incident at Aalborg, the flightcrew identified problems with the Q400's main landing gear and they prepared a controlled emergency landing. Upon landing the aircraft's main landing gear collapsed.

SAS wasn't immediately able to confirm why the Q400 landed at Lithuania's capital Vilnius while operating a flight to the coastal town of Palanga, whether the Vilnius incident involved the Q400's landing gear, or the weather at the time the incident happened.

While Lonnqvist was able to confirm that SAS was immediately grounding the 21 other Q400s in its fleet, in addition to the two aircraft damaged in the two incidents, he could not confirm if the three additional Q400s, 17 Q100s and 10 Q300s operated by SAS Group's Norwegian regional subsidiary Wideroe Flyveselskap would also be grounded.

After Sunday's incident, SAS said in a statement that Bombardier "has confirmed that what happened in Aalborg has never occurred before with this aircraft type at any airline in the world."

However. Two Q-series airliners operated by Japanese airlines suffered nose landing gear malfunctions in March. A Q400 operated by All Nippon Airways had a landing gear problem that forced its pilots to make an emergency landing, with the aircraft's nose creating sparks as it hit the runway. A week later, the pilots of an Amakusa Airlines Q-series airliner had to engage their aircraft's landing gear manually after the automatic landing-gear extension system malfunctioned.

Following Sunday's incident at Aalborg, SAS said it was implementing "a number of extraordinary checks of the landing gear on the entire fleet of Q400 aircraft. These checks are additional to official requirements."

The Danish Accident Investigation Board has begun an official investigation into the cause of the Aalborg incident. SAS says it has grounded its fleet of Q400s "until further notice," following the Vilnius incident.