French authorities yesterday closed the airport in the southern city of Montpellier for an indefinite period after a cargo plane overran the runway and ended up with its nose in a nearby lake.
Images sighted by Africa Today News, New York on Sunday morning showed the Boeing 737 of the West Atlantic cargo carrier tilting with its nose in the lake and body perched on the land. The three crew escaped the accident in the early hours of Saturday unhurt, local authorities said.
The prefecture for the Herault region disclosed that the airport would be closed to both passenger and cargo planes until further notice as a security measure and until a specialised firm came to take the plane away.
‘We will not reopen the airport as long as the aircraft is on the runway and the investigation is not finished,’ an airport source, who asked not to be named, told reporters
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‘After the removal of the aircraft, the runway will also be carefully checked,’ added the source.
Twenty-one commercial flights had been scheduled on Saturday at the airport which in peak season sees up to 197,000 passengers a month.
‘A technical incident prevents normal operation,’ said an English message on the airport’s website headlined “closure of Montpellier airport’.
The website showed that flights had either been cancelled or diverted to Marseille.
In another report, no fewer than four people were killed yesterday at an airport in Las Vegas, after two small planes collided in midair in a very bizarre situation.
A single-engine Piper PA-46 plane was preparing to land at North Las Vegas Airport in the US state of Nevada around noon local time, when it collided with a single-engine Cessna 172, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement which was obtained by Africa Today News, New York.
‘The Piper crashed… in a field east of Runway 30-Right and the Cessna fell into a water retention pond,’ the agency said. ‘Two people were aboard each aircraft.’
Four people died in the crash, local media reported, citing city officials.