At first glance, the plane above may look like it’s in mid-take off, but what really happened there is actually quite out of the ordinary.
This shot was taken yesterday afternoon at Wamena Airport in the town of Wamena, Papua. According to the authorities, the TRI-MG Asia Airlines cargo plane, which departed from Timika, landed without incident at the airport… until the crew began unloading its cargo.
“So a container containing cooking oil spilled and made the plane’s cabin floor slippery. This is what caused cargo containing cement and rice to slide back towards the tail end,” said Papua Police Spokesman Kamal, as quoted by JPNN.
As a result, the plane lost its stationary balance and went nose up, with its tail touching the ground.
The crew then unloaded all of the cargo inside the plane, which brought the plane back down to standing on its landing gears.
“Even though the plane went back to its normal position, the information we gathered is that there was damage to its tail. But we don’t yet know the extent of the damage,” Kamal said.
This is just another in a long line of embarrassing and/or dangerous incidents in the Indonesian aviation industry. But perhaps TRI-MG Asia Airlines can take comfort in the fact that they weren’t the first in the world to make a plane go nose-up while stationary, given that it has happened before to even bigger airplanes.
