This Air India Plane Just Got Stuck Underneath a Bridge. It’ll Take An Engineering Trick To Get It Out.

by Gary Leff

A retired Air India Airbus A320 got stuck under a bridge at the Delhi-Gurugram highway near the Delhi airport. In video going viral on social media, you can see not just the aircraft that’s stuck but also traffic backing up behind it.

According to the airline this isn’t their fault, they’d sold the aircraft and it was being dragged offsite by the new owner.

This is an old, scrapped aircraft which has already been sold off by us. There is no additional information as it involves the person to whom it has been sold off… The aircraft certainly does not belong to the Delhi airport’s fleet… it is being transported without any wings. It appears to be a scrapped plane and the driver may have made a judgement of error while transporting it.

Believe it or not this has happened before. An Airbus A320 got stuck under a bridge in China two years ago. Indeed, it’s not even the first time this happened in India. A Boeing 737 got stuck under a bridge in Durgapur, West Bengal, a few months after that. The first strategy is to deflate the tires then to remove the tires to get out from under the bridge.

This is actually not even the first time Air India had an accident moving an old aircraft – a crane dropped an Airbus A320 while moving it to a training facility.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  3. While Air India isn’t to blame for this event, it does make one wonder about anyone flying on a Third World airline. Is it possible that the Third World airline is as inept as the companies that buy their old aircraft? Johnny Carson used to refer to these types of airlines by the names, “Crashlandia” and “Trans Debris Airlines”!

  4. What I don’t understand about these accidents is that the difference in height between a fuselage and tail is really significant. How does one even ponder whether a fuselage will clear if they know the tail won’t?

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