As Korean Air Lines flight KE766 to Seoul was pushing back from its gate at New Chitose Airport on Tuesday, its port side wing came into contact with the starboard vertical stabilizer of a stationary Cathay Pacific Airways aircraft bound for Hong Kong. This comes just two weeks after a near-catastrophic collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and days after an aircraft with a cracked windshield was re-routed back to New Chitose.
“Our aircraft, which was stationary at the time with no customers nor crew onboard, was struck by a Korean Air A330 which was taxiing past,” Cathay Pacific said in a statement.
Korean Air confirmed that there were no injuries among its 276 passengers and 13 crew on board the Airbuss A330-300. The collision occurred as the delayed plane pushed back from its gate at 5:35 PM, when “the third-party ground handler vehicle slipped due to heavy snow.”
The Japanese government announced last week, following the Haneda incident which killed five, that it had tightened its air traffic control protocols as a result. The new nationwide protocol requires a staff member to constantly watch a monitoring system alerting control towers when a runway incursion occurs. This new protocol likely would not have helped prevent this incident.
The incident occurred when a plane towing car was pushing the Korean Air plane backward. Slippery conditions sent the plane sideways into the parked Cathay Pacific plane’s tail. The two planes were gated next to each other. Neither airline confirmed the total cost of the damage done, as their investigations are likely ongoing, but both flights required passengers to transfer to non-damaged aircraft for their respective journeys.
The weather in the region caused more than 80 flights, both departures and arrivals, to have been cancelled on Tuesday, an airport spokesperson confirmed.