Boeing 737 plane makes emergency landing minutes after take-off with 50 passengers on board in latest safety blunder
A BOEING 737 plane with 50 passengers on board has been forced into an emergency landing just minutes after taking off.
The United Airlines plane lasted just minutes in the air before complaints of an irregularity with a wing were reported in the latest Boeing safety blunder.
The plane left Fukuoka Airport in Japan on Friday morning at around 11:45am before swiftly being forced to turn back around, police say.
No one was injured in the major ordeal.
Police are now investigating the mishap in order to find out what caused the emergency landing.
The runway at Fukuoka Airport was temporarily closed for routine safety checks after the emergency landing.
This is now the fourth Boeing related incident in just the last three days after The Sun reported on a burning plane skidding off the runway in Senegal.
A Boeing 737 jet was seen on fire as terrified passengers were forced to jump to the ground for safety in the Dakar airport.
All 73 passengers were evacuated with fifteen of them being left injured- four of them seriously.
Hours earlier on Thursday, another Boeing jet suffered a technical issue, raising safety concerns and causing further headache for the aircraft giant.
A total of 190 people had to be evacuated after their Corendon Airlines flight had a tyre bust during landing at the Gazipasa airport in Alanya, Turkey.
As it all comes just days after a Boeing cargo belonging to the US mail service FedEx plane crash-landed on its nose on Wednesday.
The 767 aircraft was travelling from Paris to Istanbul and sent sparks flying as it nosedived on the runway.
Several other blunders have already occurred this year when a Boeing 747 was caught on camera bouncing along the runway.
The Lufthansa Airlines plane was seen dramatically smashing into the ground twice in Los Angeles Airport (LAX) before the pilot gave up and aborted the rough landing.
Two days earlier, a wheel fell off a Boeing 737 fully loaded with passengers as smoke billows from the commercial jet.
Dramatic footage showed the plane grinding along the runway before it was forced to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff.
The multiple blunders come as the aircraft is giant is facing controversy over safety concerns.
Boeing has always maintained their jets are safe to fly.
Sky high chaos: a timeline of Boeing incidents
BOEING has found itself at the centre of increasingly concerning reports in recent months thanks to malfunctions on its planes.
April 2018- Woman dies after being partially sucked out of window on Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 flight
October 2018 – Boeing 737 MAX 8 Indonesia Lion Air fatal crash leaves 189 dead
March 2019 – Boeing 737 MAX 8 Ethiopia Airlines fatal crash leaves 157 dead
January 2024 – Boeing 747 Delta Airlines plane loses front tyre
January 2024 – Boeing Alaska Airlines ripped window leaving gaping hole in the plane
March 2024 – Wheel falls off Boeing 777 United Airlines plane smashing cars below
March 2024 – Boeing 787 LATAM LA800 took a “sudden nose-dive” leaving 50 injured
April 2024- Boeing 737 engine cover ripped off mid-air
April 2024 – Wheel falls off and smoke billows from Boeing 737 FlySafair FA212 in South Africa
April 2024: Boeing 747 Lufthansa Airlines seen bouncing along the runway in another huge safety blunder.
May 2024 – Boeing 767 FedEx plane nosedives on runway due to front landing gear failure
May 2024- A 737 with 50 passengers on board was forced into an emergency landing in Japan just minutes after take-off
WHISTLEBLOWER SPEAKS
The failed landing is just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding Boeing as investigations continue into the company.
Brave whistleblower Sam Salehpour described how he witnessed workers jumping on plane parts to force them to fit on “defected” aircraft.
He went on to say he was told to “shut up” and threatened by Boeing bosses after constantly raising serious safety concerns over how the planes were being assembled.
Salehpour took part in the bombshell back-to-back US Congress hearings this week as he testified against his employers.
The engineer worked at Boeing for a decade and claims he tried to warn them of his concerns over much of that time period.
At the Congress hearing Salehpour said: “I’m not here today because I want to be here.
“I was ignored, told not to create delays, told, frankly, to shut up…
“My boss said, ‘I would have killed someone who said what you said,’ during a meeting.”
His biggest issues were with how some of the jets were being assembled over the past three years.
In one of the shocking claims he said: “I literally saw people jumping on pieces of the airplane to get them to align.
“I repeatedly produced reports for my supervisor and Boeing management that the gaps on the 787 were not being properly measured or shimmed into two major joints of the 787.”
Salehpour found that across 29 planes, major gaps were reported but not addressed a staggering 98.7 per cent of the time.
In a further 80 per cent of cases, the unclosed gaps ended up being filled with debris, he told Congress.
Another former Boeing employee turned whistleblower John Barnett, 62, gave evidence against the company just days before he died from a “self-inflicted” wound.
He had been providing evidence of alleged wrongdoing at Boeing to investigators working on a lawsuit against the company at the time of his death, according to the BBC.
In 2019, he told reporters he had seen workers purposely fitting sub-standard parts onto aircraft on the production line.
Barnett claimed that defective parts were mishandled and sometimes lost or refitted to planes from the company scrapyard to meet production timelines.
He also alleged that he had discovered major issues in some of the planes’ oxygen systems which could lead to one in four masks not functioning properly.
He also says his complaints were ignored.
