American Airlines Plane Makes Hard Landing In Maui, Six Injured
American A321neo makes VERY hard landing in Hawaii
This incident happened on Saturday, January 27, 2024, and involves American Airlines flight AA271 from Los Angeles (LAX) to Maui (OGG). The flight was operated by a roughly three-year-old Airbus A321neo with the registration code N416AN, and it was carrying 167 passengers and seven crew members.
The flight was operating a bit behind schedule, as it left Los Angeles nearly 90 minutes late, arriving in Maui nearly 80 minutes late. However, that wasn’t a big deal compared to what happened upon landing.
American has acknowledged that the aircraft “experienced an issue upon landing,” and that it “taxied to the gate under its own power and customers deplaned normally.”
Following the incident, the aircraft was taken out of service for a hard landing inspection. The aircraft was supposed to return to Los Angeles as flight AA212, but that flight ended up getting canceled. The following morning, the aircraft is still on the ground in Maui.
Two thoughts about this hard landing story
Hard landings — even ones with injuries — happen. It’s unfortunate, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is now investigating this incident, and I’m sure we’ll find out the cause. What I find the strangest about this story, though, is that five of the six injuries were among flight attendants.
In theory, flight attendants should be best positioned for a rough landing, as they’re strapped in much tighter (with a harness) than just the average passenger with a seatbelt.
So I can’t help but wonder why they were the ones who primarily suffered injuries, while passengers didn’t? Does this relate to how flight attendant jump seats face backwards, and somehow that impacts the g-forces during a hard landing in a negative way?
Also, I’m exhausted about how the first response to basically every aviation story is to blame it on DEI. I mean, my gosh, with absolutely no information, that’s the conclusion we come to? While we’ve certainly had some incidents recently, aviation is as safe as it has ever been in terms of fatalities per number of people traveling.
Look, I’m not here to argue the merit of DEI, because that’s exhausting, especially on the internet. But are we simply going to assume that every single aviation incident is due to DEI? How are we going to justify all of the accidents that happened for decades, at a time when there was even less diversity in the cockpit? Are we going to argue that the white dude who tried to turn off the engines of a Horizon Air jet last year was also hired due to DEI? Or what are we going to blame that on?
It’s sad the extent to which reality just doesn’t matter to people anymore. “Well, someone made a mistake, let’s immediately assume it wasn’t a white guy, because they never screw up.”