MOSCOW - A plane of Papua New Guinea’s Air Niugini airline with around 35 passengers and 12 crew members on board on Friday made a successful water landing in the Federated States of Micronesia, leaving no people dead, media reported.
According to the Pacific Daily News media outlet, the incident took place near the airport of the island municipality of Weno in the state of Chuuk. The Boeing 737, which arrived from the island of Pohnpei (Senyavin Islands, Federated States of Micronesia), tried to land at the Chuuk Airport but ended up in the lagoon.
Chuuk airport manager Jimmy Emilio told the outlet that all passengers and crew members were evacuated from the plane and sent to a hospital for medical checkups. Some witnesses said that they saw people with serious injuries, including broken arms and legs. Sometime after the evacuation had been completed, the plane sank underwater. Causes of the incident remain unknown.
There are only several cases of safe water landings in the history of civil aviation. In 1963, the Aeroflot’s Tu-124 plane with 45 passengers and seven crew members landed on the Neva River in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) after an emergency situation caused by a gear failure and fuel exhaustion.
The most famous safe water landing took place on January 15, 2009, when US Airways’ Airbus A320-214 with 155 people on board struck a flock of Canada geese and lost all engine power, which urged pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles to land the plane on the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan. No people died in these two incidents.
