The flight was operated by an ATR-72 aircraft belonging to private Portuguese airline White Airways, which is part of the Omni Group and undertakes some of the hourly Lisbon-Porto flights on behalf of TAP Express, a subsidiary of TAP Portugal.
The incident occurred on Saturday night (22 October) at around 10.35pm and all 20 passengers and four crew disembarked the plane uninjured.
A secondary runway was opened for departures shortly after midnight, and by Sunday morning all operations had returned to normal.
Subsequently, several versions of the damage sustained to the aircraft emerged, from the tyres on the landing gear having burst, to landing and nose gear having being “crushed.”
Speaking to Lusa News Agency, Álvaro Neves, head of Portugal’s Bureau for the Prevention and Investigation of Aircraft Accidents (GPIAA), said “an investigator was sent to the airport, where the plane suffered the collapse of its nose gear and left main landing gear.”
Mr. Neves told Lusa that the airport said “all the internal and external resources that are used in the cases of emergencies were triggered immediately”.
He later added in an interview with newspaper Diário de Notícias that a serious accident at Lisbon Airport could render the infrastructure “inoperable” and close it “for days”, due to a lack of means for air crash investigation.
After the incident, airport management company ANA issued a statement on its website, revealing that following an “aircraft accident within the airport perimeter, emergency procedures were put into effect.”
And national flag-carrier TAP released a statement in which it said the runway had been closed due to “the blowout of a tyre upon landing”.
Other sources claimed the plane made a heavy landing because of a “down-draft” and “bounced three times before landing, breaking the nose and left main landing gear.”
Website Aviation Herald reported that “both nose wheels separated on hard landing.”
The website stated the ATR-72 “suffered a hard touchdown, bounced, touched down hard again with the nose gear causing both nose wheels to separate while the nose gear strut remained intact. The aircraft bounced a second time, touched down a third time and rolled out on both main gear and nose gear strut at 22:34L.
“The aircraft came to a stop about 290 metres/950 feet past the intersection with runway 17/35 (minimum distance to left runway edge of runway 35,150 metres/500 feet). Both runways were closed (...) for operational reasons.”
According to Aviation Herald, Air Traffic Control “told aircraft on approach frequency, that both runways were temporarily unavailable after an ATR had “crushed” its nose gear and left a lot of debris on the runway.”
Witnesses at the airport allegedly reported there had been “fire and sparks from the nose gear during landing”, Aviation Herald said, adding, “Portugal’s GPIAA opened an investigation.
“The GPIAA indicated preliminary findings suggesting the aircraft touched down hard, possibly as result of a downdraft, bounced, touched down hard with the nose gear causing both nose wheels to separate, bounced another time and rolled out on nose gear strut and main wheels”.
A subsequent provisional bulletin on the incident from the GPIAA, published on Tuesday this week, confirmed the plane had sustained “substantial” damage after landing in “heavy rain conditions and wind gusts plus ascending and descending wind currents.
“According to a crew report, below 50 feet the aircraft was shaken and the final approach was in severe conditions of rain, and the plane touched three times on the ground. (Bounced landing)”.The report concluded that the aircraft sustained “substantial damage to the front landing gear strut” and had to be towed to the hangar.
As a result the runway was closed until “4.14 UTC [5.14am local time]”.