Ten people were injured after a Boeing plane skidded off a runway in Senegal’s capital.
The Air Senegal flight operated by TransAir was headed to Bamako in neighbouring Mali and 10 of the 85 people on board were injured as a result of the incident, Transport Minister El Malick Ndiaye said.
“Our plane just caught fire,” wrote Malian musician Cheick Siriman Sissoko in a post on Facebook that showed passengers jumping down the emergency slides at night as flames engulfed one side of the aircraft.
Screams can be heard in the background. Passengers have either been taken to hospital or to a hotel to rest and recover.
A plane is seen after skidding off the runway at Blaise Diagne International Airport in Dakar, Senegal. Pic: Reuters
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The Aviation Safety Network published photos of the damaged plane in a grassy field, surrounded by fire suppressant foam, on X.
One engine on board the Boeing 737-300 appeared to have broken apart and a wing was also damaged, photos published by the Aviation Safety Network, which tracks airline accidents, on social media purport to show.
The airport reopened on Thursday morning after closing overnight.
Boeing referred a request for comment to the airlines.
It was the third incident involving a Boeing airplane this week.
Passengers used the emergency slide. Pic: Cheick Siriman Sissoko
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On Thursday, 190 people were safely evacuated from a plane in Turkey after one of its tyres burst during landing at a southern airport, Turkey’s transportation ministry said.
And a day earlier, footage emerged of a Boeing cargo plane landing nose-down on a runway at Istanbul Airport after its landing gear failed to deploy, according to Turkish authorities.
The company has been under intense pressure since a door plug blew out of a Boeing 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, leaving a gaping hole in the plane.
The Federal Aviation Administration in February gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix quality problems and meet safety standards for building planes after the accident.
The incident has raised scrutiny of Boeing to the highest level since two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
