A Boeing 737 plane carrying 85 people skidded off the runway at the airport in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, injuring 11 people, the country’s transport minister said in a statement on Thursday.
An Air Senegal flight chartered by privately-owned Transair was headed for the Malian capital Bamako, airport managers LAS said in a statement after the early hours drama left four passengers seriously hurt. The jet “came off the runway during its takeoff phase” around one am, said LAS, made up of Turkish group Limak, the publicly-owned airport operator AIBD and another Turkish entity, Summa.
The group said the airport at Diass, 50 kilometers from Dakar, had reopened shortly after midday. El Malick Ndiaye, the transport minister, said the Air Sénégal flight operated by TransAir was headed to Bamako late on Wednesday carrying 79 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew. The injured were being treated in hospital, while the other survivors have been taken to a hotel to rest.
This incident comes as Boeing has been dealing with heightened regulatory scrutiny and other fallout from a midair blowout of a cabin panel door plug on a nearly new 737 MAX 9 in January. The planemaker is carrying the burden of multiple sequential crises from deadly crashes of two 737 MAX jets to the deep slump in travel during the pandemic.
Thursday’s incident came a day after a Boeing 767 Fedex cargo plane touched down at Istanbul airport without its front landing gear which failed to open, though nobody was hurt, the US Federal Aviation administration said.
(With agency inputs)
