All safe and sound after plane makes tough landing

All 164 passengers and crew members on board a Vietnam Airlines plane were safe and sound after the aircraft made a rough landing in Tan Son Nhat Airport on Friday and managed to stop just meters away from the end of the runway when both rear wheels had exploded. The cause is now under investigation, the Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) said.
Lai Xuan Thanh, deputy director general of CAAV, told the Daily on the phone on Sunday that the incident resulted from a technical problem that the authority was trying to find out based on initial reports of Vietnam Airlines.
“We are in the process of investigating the case,” Thanh said. “It is a technical problem, but it takes time for us to find out the cause,” Thanh said.
Vietnam Airlines reported in a statement sent to the Daily that the pilots of the Airbus A320 with 164 passengers on board discovered something wrong with the hydraulic oil system at the undercarriage when they prepared for landing.
The aircraft with registered number of VNA-302 safely touched on Tan Son Nhat Airport at 2:45 p.m. on Friday and came to a complete stop at the edge of Runway 25L. The plane was undamaged except the exploded back wheels as a result of an emergency brake.
All the passengers including 26 children and two newborn babies as well as the crew members disembarked from the plane within five minutes. Nobody was hurt from the emergency exit.
All the luggage and cargo on Flight VN453 were also taken from the plane that took off from Cam Ranh Airport in the central coastal city of Khanh Hoa, according to Vietnam Airlines.
The captain of the flight from Cam Ranh to Tan Son Nhat airports on Friday was Peruvian Jual Ruiz, whose flying hours are 17,500. He together with his Vietnamese assistant Nguyen Khanh Thanh operated the Airbus A320, which has been put into service since July 1996 and underwent the latest technical check on May 25, 2009.
The incident on Friday was among the few incidents related to emergency landing reported by Vietnam Airlines in the year to date.
In January, a Boeing 777 plane of the airline with 316 passengers on board had to return to Tan Son Nhat Airport for an urgent landing nearly 30 minutes after taking off from this airport for Hanoi after the captain read a problem with the left engine.
In February, the Vietnam Airlines crew had to divert an Airbus A320 plane carrying 135 passengers for an emergency landing at Noi Bai Airport after more than 20 minutes of departure for Singapore.