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A BRITISH AIRWAYS plane crashed into a building at Johannesburg Airport in South Africa overnight.
The Boeing 747-400 en route for London Heathrow Airport took a runway that was too narrow for the plane, said South African Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) spokeswoman Phindiwe Gwebu.
“This resulted in the aircraft’s right-hand wing impacting the office building,” she said.
Runway
The control tower “told them to take one taxiway and they took another one. They took a wrong one,” said Gwebu.
Four people inside the building were lightly injured, but the 185 passengers and 17 crew on board were unharmed during the late-night accident, according to the CAA.
“Four ground-handling employees who were in the building at the time experienced minor injuries,” Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) said in a statement.
A photo taken by a passenger from the cabin, shown on Sky News, showed the aircraft’s giant wing wedged into a quarter of the length of the small building.
The airline tweeted this message in relation to the incident:
(Twitter/@British_Airways)
Additional reporting - © AFP, 2013
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