Ryanair Planes Collide

Ryanair turned into Ryanscare for the passengers on two of its recent flights when the collided at London's Stansted Airport on Saturday. 

Passengers faced delays of up to three hours after a Warsaw-bound plane and an aircraft from Frankfurt Hahn that had just landed, collided in the parking area of Stansted Airport at about 6.45am.

The crash occurred when the wing tip of one plane and the tail cone of another "made contact", Ryanair said.

Essex Police said routine breath tests on both pilots returned zero readings and no one was hurt.

Both of the planes were Boeing 737-800 models, which can carry up to 189 passengers, a Ryanair spokesman confirmed.

One passenger on the Warsaw-bound flight said on Twitter: "Huge loud crashing noise and totally felt the crush sitting at the back. Thank God it only hit the wing as if it was the body of the plane it'd been apocalypse."

Ryanair spokesman Robin Kiely said: "This morning at London Stansted the wing tip and tail cone of two Ryanair aircraft made contact while one aircraft was taxiing to stand and the other was commencing pushback from stand.

"Customers were disembarked and boarded two replacement aircraft which departed Stansted with a delay of approximately three hours.

"Our Stansted based engineering team are currently investigating and will repair both aircraft and return them to service as soon as possible.

"Ryanair sincerely apologises to affected customers for any inconvenience."

Escape Slide Inflates in Flight - United

An evacuation slide inflated inside a United Airlines plane as it flew from Chicago to Southern California, filling part of the cabin and prompting the pilot to make an emergency landing in Kansas.

Passenger Mike Schroeder said he was sitting in the front row of the plane bound for Orange County, California, late Sunday when he heard a hiss and pop behind him.

Schroeder, 58, turned around and saw the Boeing 737-700's evacuation slide inflating. The slide — which would normally inflate outside the plane in an emergency — filled the galley.

"I thought to myself, 'I hope there is no one in the restroom because if they are they're not coming out for a long time,'" he said in a telephone interview.

United Airlines officials said in a statement that no one aboard Flight 1463 was injured.

United said the plane would be flown without passengers to a larger airport for a complete inspection to determine how and why the slide accidentally deployed. Spokeswoman Christen David said she had no details about whether the incident would trigger additional inspections or whether similar incidents had occurred on other United aircraft. Federal aviation officials were investigating.

MH370 Power Outage Tampering?

Authorities investigating the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have found evidence of a mysterious power outage.

Data reveals a “log-on” request was made to a satellite just an hour-and-a-half into the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The log-on request (known in the aviation business as a “handshake”) was described as “not common” in the report released by The Australian Transport Safety Bureau last week.

It adds a “handshake” can occur for only a few reasons: “These include a power interruption to the aircraft satellite data (SDU) unit, a software failure, loss of critical systems providing input to the SDU or a loss of the link due to aircraft altitude.

“An analysis was performed which determined that the characteristics and timing of the logon requests were best matched as resulting from power interruption to the SDU.”

Aviation expert Peter Marosszeky, from the University of New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald the power outage could be linked to an attempt by hijackers to tamper with cockpit equipment in a bid to avoid radar detection.

He said: “If there was a crew wanting to do something that was rather sinister or there were hijackers on board, they would remove power by opening up the bus-tie breakers and opening up the battery control switch.