Shutting down early on Thursday due to a BinAir cargo plane's nose wheel collapsing after touching down on the runway, causing massive delays and plane diversion, Dublin Airport is now reopened and running as normal.
The Dublin Airport Authority said nobody was hurt when the forward landing gear of the Fairchild Metroliner twin-turboprop aircraft failed, according to Fox News.
The aircraft, operated by the Munich-based freight carrier BinAir, was carrying two pilots and a cargo of laboratory rats from Kent, southeast England. It thumped to a stop with its nose on the tarmac.
This was not the first time BinAir, which uses a fleet of about a dozen Metroliner turboprop aircraft and specializes in ad-hoc freight bookings, had a landing-gear mishap while on the runway.
In January 2010 a BinAir Metroliner skidded off the runway in Stuttgart, Germany, when the right-side landing gear collapsed upon landing. In that accident, the pilot reported a landing gear fault warning and aborted the initial landing, but ground crew said they could see the landing gear fully deployed. German air safety investigators found it collapsed upon hitting the tarmac, reported Fox News.
This resulted in the European Union and German air safety authorities placing BinAir under "intensified" scrutiny, and warned it could be placed on the EU's blacklisted airlines, but the airline retained its operating license after it undertook unspecified actions for (at)verified safety deficiencies," according to an April 2011 report by the European Commission's Air Safety Committee, as reported by Fox News.
BinAir declined to comment. When The Associated Press called the airline's only publicly listed number, labeled a "24-hour hot line," the official who answered wouldn't identify himself by name, said the airline would not be making a statement because "nothing happened," and hung up.
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