Our neighbors to the west got a real travel scare this week… and they weren’t even on vacation. The St. Clair family is counting their blessings after part of a commercial airliner fell out of the sky and into their backyard. Luckily no one was injured.
Still, the incident has left Judy St. Clair, who found the two-foot-long piece of metal stuck in her grass, shaken up.
“I was coming out with the laundry basket to hang my laundry, and I noticed a piece of metal in my yard, a large, large piece of metal in my yard,” St. Clair told local news reporters who showed up to catch a glimpse of the broken airline piece. “And I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, that looks like an airplane wing.’ But I thought, ‘How can that be?’
St. Clair says she found the piece of metal under her tree, but didn’t immediately associate it with an airliner. Within minutes, the Wisconsin homemaker called the police who recognized the metal and contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, which is now investigating the incident.
Once the officers left her property, St. Clair said she finally realized how lucky she is that she didn’t come out to do the laundry earlier.
“You worry about a lot of dangers, like with my little grandchild Hannah here, I worry about car accidents, but I never worry about things falling from the sky,” St. Clair said.
Yesterday Northwest Airlines confirmed that after a flight from Detroit landed in Madison Wednesday morning, an inspector discovered that the left inboard flap to fuselage fairing was missing. A spokesperson for the airline said the two-foot piece of metal is used to reduce drag on the aircraft and that the 89 passengers on board were never in danger (though he never mentioned anything about the people on the ground).
The DC-9 has since been grounded until the FAA completes its investigation.
Kind of makes me you think twice about sending your children outside to wave at airplanes.
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