An Incident From Back In The Day

When you work at an airport you get to see a lot of interesting things. I have witnessed near miracles and near tragedies. This following story falls some place in the middle.

I was working day shift with the usual band of odd balls. In OAK there are 32 gates. SWA has 12 of them. On any given night there are 22 aircraft that spend the night, as a result we have to move up to 10 planes each night to our remote parking area. When this incident happened there were were fewer gates, a total of 27 of which we at SWA used 11.

We were not the only game in town and there are other airlines that also push their planes off the gates at night. One of those airlines was American Airlines (AA no longer flies into Oakland). After all the SWA planes had been brought to the gates we noticed a commotion over by the MD-80 which AA has parked out on the ramp over night parking.

I rolled out there with my buddy SkyWalker and the nose gear on the MD-80 was pulled out of the strut.

  

The picture above is how she looked when we got there. When I worked at Delta we used to move MD-80s around with bag tugs, but that was not going to do it for this bunch of idiots! The contract ramp company had hooked up a wide-body tug that looked like it could have pulled the airport terminal building itself across the ramp up to this poor little MD-80.

The communication between the cockpit and the tug driver was not what I would call ideal. It seems that the aircraft brakes were set when the tug driver decided to FLOOR IT!!!

As a result the plane did not budge but that was not going to stop this gigantic tug. The tug proceeded to pull the nose tires/lower strut completely off the plane!

Well as you would expect all the AA big brass managers were all standing around scratching their heads. There was a lady who I assume to be the top OAK manager who asked my pal SkyWalker to stop taking pictures of the plane so naturally in fine SWA fashion he started taking pictures of her instead.

The AA Go-Team or Top notch Mechs showed up a few hours later with airbags and lifted her up.

That part was pretty interesting. The huge bags were inflated and they put in a new strut and the plane was gone the next day.

When she was up off the ground they put some chocks under her from the contract company that did the damage in the first place.

These types of things are happening all the time at airports. I have probably forgotten way more things like this than I can remember but I'll get with SkyWalker and see if he remembers any more.