A Japan Airlines plane struck a parked Delta Air Lines jet while taxiing at an airport in Seattle.
The right wing of the Japan Airlines plane ‘made contact with the tail’ of the Delta aircraft near Concourse S around 10.15am on Wednesday, according to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
A total of 142 passengers were aboard the Delta jet that was waiting to be de-iced for its departure to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner had touched down from Tokyo.
‘There are no injuries reported at this time,’ stated the airport.
‘SEA is working with both airlines to safely deplane passengers and bring them to the terminal.’
Images shared on social media showed the Japan Airlines wing cut into the tail of the Delta jet.
At least a couple of passengers wrote that the incident was ‘scary’.
Some flights were paused immediately after the incident, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
There was little impact to operations at the airport, said the Port of Seattle.
A passenger aboard the Japan Airlines plane, Brett Powers, 67, said the pilot announced the gate was full and that they would wait about 10 minutes, but that the jet started moving several minutes afterward. Then a passenger started screaming for an unknown reason.
‘It felt like the pilot had hit the brakes really hard,’ Powers told The Seattle Times.
The avid traveler said the bump ‘was a new one for me’ and made him more scared to travel by air.
It happened one week after an American Airlines regional jet and a Black Hawk helicopter collided and fell into the Potomac River in Washington, DC, killing all 67 people on the aircrafts. It was the US’s deadliest aviation disaster since 2001.
And two days later, an ambulance jet carrying six people crashed near a mall and homes in Philadelphia, killing all aboard and an individual on the ground.
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