African Airline Reports Drone Collision With Passenger Jet (airlive.net)

McGruber writes: Airlive is reporting that a drone collided with a Boeing 737-700 as it was on approach to Tete, Mozambique airport on Thursday. The 737 landed safely, but the right-hand side of the nose dome and fuselage were badly damaged.
The plane was carrying 80 passengers and a crew of 6, according to the Aviation Herald, which has more pictures of the damaged nose dome. "The crew heard a loud bang," they report, adding that "no abnormal indications followed. The crew, suspecting a bird strike, continued the approach for a safe landing." But USA Today notes that "While pilots have reported hundreds of sightings of drones near planes, previous suspected collisions have been debunked."

Comments

Re:This is not a drone like your kids toy

[Anonymous Coward]

it just looks like a low speed collision with something like a stairway.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding your comment correctly.

Are you saying that you suspect that the African crew of this plane landed it, and then collided with a movable passenger loading/unloading staircase while on the ground? And then they came up with this drone/bird/whatever strike story to deflect blame away from themselves?

Or are you trying to say something else?

Birdstrikes don't always leave blood or feathers.

[queazocotal]

http://avherald.com/h?article=... - also in africa.
http://avherald.com/img/comair... - this damage was done by a red billed kite impact.
Broadly similar amount of buckling, though in a different place.
There are a lot of large birds in Africa, and aircraft frequently hit them.

Re:This is not a drone like your kids toy

[ShanghaiBill]

Are you saying that you suspect that the African crew of this plane landed it, and then collided with a movable passenger loading/unloading staircase while on the ground? And then they came up with this drone/bird/whatever strike story to deflect blame away from themselves?

That is plausible. It is also plausible that some bean counter made up the story because the insurance covers in-air collisions differently. Or some PR person made it up for publicity. Or maybe the ground crew tweeted the picture, and the rumor spread from there. TFA contains almost zero information, and does not say that the drone story came from the pilots. The Facebook post by the airline doesn't even mention the drone, although I may have misunderstood since I can read Spanish way better than Portuguese.

Re:This is not a drone like your kids toy

[Black Parrot]

It must have been a big-ass drone to do that kind of damage.

Probably it's the UFO spotted earlier in Chile.

Ground impact

[thesupraman]

Actually, the damage pattern looks almost exactly consistent with a ground impact.
It is reasonably clear from the images that the impact came from the front right, not straight on, and any
drone moving fast enough to create that impact vector at approach speed would have punched straight through,
not made the distributed damage we see - this was quite clearly a low speed impact.

The pilots 'reporting a loud bang' on approach makes it sound like a good dose of arse-covering, something
endemic in Africa when costly damage happens.

You will note there is no evidence given of drone remains, etc. Something that would most certainly have been
chased down immediately if this was actually a drone strike.
A bird strike (which would do less damage that a drone of the size they are claiming) looks like this:
http://www.birdstrike.it/birdstrike/file/images/file/2012.06.05_birdstrike.png

Very VERY different.

Re:Ground impact

[BlueStrat]

Actually, the damage pattern looks almost exactly consistent with a ground impact.
It is reasonably clear from the images that the impact came from the front right, not straight on, and any
drone moving fast enough to create that impact vector at approach speed would have punched straight through,
not made the distributed damage we see - this was quite clearly a low speed impact.

The pilots 'reporting a loud bang' on approach makes it sound like a good dose of arse-covering, something
endemic in Africa when costly damage happens.

You will note there is no evidence given of drone remains, etc. Something that would most certainly have been
chased down immediately if this was actually a drone strike.
A bird strike (which would do less damage that a drone of the size they are claiming) looks like this:
http://www.birdstrike.it/birds...

Very VERY different.

Retired senior avionics tech here that's seen plenty of damaged radomes over the decades on a wide variety of aircraft at various FBOs, resulting from a wide variety of causes. You're pretty much spot-on. This was almost certainly a very low speed impact IMHO.

Perhaps it was a ground service vehicle (cargo or passenger conveyor/stair vehicle, service/maintenance stairs, etc). I've seen damage quite similar occur in crowded maintenance hangars resulting from moving aircraft around carelessly, recklessly-driven ground service/maintenance vehicles, and from accidents on crowded & busy taxiways under poor visibility conditions.

I'd put $50 on this "story" being just that; a story to cover asses with.

Maybe they were attempting to reenact the "stair-truck and passenger-jet chase scene" from the Jim Cary movie "Liar Liar" and had an [Jim Cary] "oopsie!" {/Jim Cary].

Whatever it was, chances are extremely tiny it was from a drone impact in flight.

Strat