A British Airways Boeing 787 was grounded at London Heathrow on Saturday after the aircraft slowly impaled itself on a set of engineering steps – the result of someone fuelling a plane while forgetting the stairs were still underneath it.
The incident unfolded during pre-departure preparations for Flight BA299 to Chicago. Maintenance crews had positioned portable steps beneath an open hatch on the underside of the fuselage to replace oxygen cylinders. At that point, the aircraft was empty and the steps fit fine.
Then someone fuelled the plane.
As roughly 126,000 litres of jet fuel entered the tanks, the 787 grew heavier and settled lower on its landing gear – a well-documented characteristic of the aircraft type that ground crews are specifically trained to account for. The fuselage descended onto the steps.
The steps went into the fuselage. Nobody was happy about this.
Engineers, police officers, and airport staff arrived at the remote stand in large numbers to photograph the situation and, according to one passenger on Reddit, walk away without solving it. Around 300 passengers spent 90 minutes on buses watching this unfold before being driven back to the terminal.
The aircraft – a nearly new jet worth approximately $355 million – remained on the ground two days later. British Airways faces an estimated $352,000 in passenger compensation and has not yet explained how a $355 million airplane was bested by a set of stairs.
It is not the first time. In 2021, a British Airways 787 at Heathrow had its nose gear collapse after a maintenance engineer removed a locking pin they weren’t supposed to touch.
