An Alaska Airlines flight arriving from Seattle made a hard landing at John Wayne Airport in Orange County on Sunday night as Tropical Storm Hilary roiled Southern California.
Flight 1288 made it to its destination without major difficulties, but the landing at the Los Angeles-area airport did not go as planned.
In a video taken by a passenger and later posted to YouTube, the plane hits the ground hard upon landing — and then drags its left wing along the tarmac as orange sparks fly into the dark night air.
Passengers in the video can be heard shouting about the fiery spectacle, with one person yelling “There’s sparks outside! What the f***? Why is there sparks outside?”
Fortunately, no one was injured in the incident. The plane, however, was damaged and, according to an Alaska Airlines statement provided to NPR, ended up stranded in rain from the storm.
“The aircraft was unable to taxi to the gate due to an issue with its landing gear,” Alaska Airlines officials said in the statement.
Photographs posted later to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, showed some of the damage to the plane’s wing, which one commentator speculated was punctured by the landing gear.
Hilary, Southern California’s first tropical storm in 84 years, disrupted routines across the region due to high winds and rain that flooded parts of Los Angeles.
But even in the best of weather, John Wayne Airport is a challenging place to land a plane: the airport has a shorter runway than most of its counterparts in the US, measuring just 5,700 feet. The runway at Los Angeles International Airport, for instance, is 9,000 feet in length.
