A United Airlines aircraft that veered off the runway during landing in Houston experienced a gear failure.
This incident, which happened today, Friday, March 8, 2024, problems United Airlines flight UA2477, which is expected to depart Memphis, Tennessee, and arrive in Houston, Texas, at IAH. N27290 is the registration code of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, which was used for the flight. It was four years old.
The 81-minute flight routine landed on runway 27 in Houston at 7:58 AM, more than an hour before its scheduled arrival time of 8:28 AM. Unfortunately, things rapidly got worse after that. At the very end of the runway, the plane broke apart, causing its left rear gear to collapse and landing in the grass.
The actual order of events is unclear as of now; we don’t know if the plane taxied into the grass, which led to the gear collapsing, or if the gear collapsed and the plane ended up in the grass.
Both the crew and the passengers were able to exit the aircraft via the stairs without any injuries. Although the gate is marked as “HOLD,” the flight comes to have arrived 24 minutes early on United’s flight status page.
What makes this United Boeing 737 MAX incident odd
This is why I find this incident is so interesting. 10,000 feet is a lot longer runway than a 737 requires on Houston’s Runway 27. I was initially curious as to how the plane got to the far end of the runway—in the grass. Did the pilots fail to slow down, did they simply land much too late, or something else?
You can hear the United pilots asking to “roll it all the way to the end” based on air traffic control audio that has been made public. The air traffic controller approves it, but instructs the United pilots to keep speed up. They would probably want to roll to the end because it would save them a taxi ride to get to their arrival gate. The pilots were instructed to maintain their speed because another plane was landing behind them, and the air traffic controller did not want their maneuver to obstruct that landing.
What specifically went wrong there is secret. The pilots wouldn’t have been willingly rolling it to the end if there had been a problem at the time of landing, which doesn’t sound like it did. Did they find it difficult to slow down after maintaining their speed too high? Were they attempting to turn off the runway too quickly? Alternatively, how did they wind up in the runway’s grass at the end? All of this will undoubtedly become apparent very soon after an investigation is completed.
Even though the Boeing 737 MAX receives a lot of the blame, I wouldn’t assume to the conclusion that this is a result of a more serious issue with the aircraft. Let’s hold off on making conclusions until the investigation is complete.
In the End
Upon arrival in Houston, a United Airlines Boeing 737 MAX experienced a landing gear collapse. Similar incidents do occur, but the circumstances are unusual. The pilots asked to roll to the end of the runway (possibly to make the taxi to the gate faster), but they wound up in the end of the runway’s grass in the process.
