United Airlines suffers 4th emergency incident in 5 days
A United Airlines flight headed to Mexico City from San Francisco was forced to land in Los Angeles on Friday due to an issue with the aircraft’s hydraulic system — in the airline’s fourth emergency since Monday.
Flight 821 departed from San Francisco International Airport just after 1 p.m. local time, and was scheduled to land in Mexico’s capital roughly four and a half hours later.
However, after the issue was reported by crew, the Airbus 320 carrying 105 passengers was “diverted” to LAX where it “landed safely and passengers were deplaned normally at the gate,” a United Airlines spokesperson told the Daily News.
Preliminary information shows there was only an issue with one hydraulic system on the aircraft, the spokesperson said, noting the plane “has three hydraulic systems for redundancy purposes.”
Earlier on Friday, passengers on a United flight coming from Memphis, Tennessee, had to be evacuated from a Boeing 737 Max 8 after the plane rolled off a runway at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
“The aircraft left the pavement and entered the grass,” airport officials said.
Those two incidents came just a day after another United flight was also forced to make an emergency landing when a tire fell off the plane shortly after takeoff. The 265-pound tire went plummeting to the ground, smashing into cars in a parking lot below.
Flight 35, which was headed to Osaka, Japan, from San Francisco, “lost one tire after takeoff” and was forced to land at LAX, a spokesperson told The News. “Our team quickly arranged for a new aircraft to take customers to Osaka (Thursday) evening.”
And on Monday, a United Airlines flight from Houston to Fort Myers, Florida, was forced to turn around after one of the engines on the Boeing 737 caught fire five minutes into the flight, local television station KTRK reported.
No injuries were reported in any of the emergencies, the company said.
The incidents are being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency said in a statement.
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