I was first surprised why my BA Leeds -London shuttle is full then I got to the airport and as it looks to me the morning rotation suffered either a push back incident or when it arrived some sort of problem with the front gear. It is blocking the gate and I don’t think it is going anywhere soon.
Anyone knows what exactly happened?

Well I’m not sure about the drones but the plane front gear is in a 90 degree angle also in a half way pushed back position

Issues indeed! Two planes on the ground here this evening now.

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...5594609a6.jpeg


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...81735d3b4.jpeg

the drone issues happened around 2-3pm. Quite a few diversions

I was on BA1341 this morning and sent through the report to The BASource that is quoted above. All was going swimmingly and on time and we started to pushback. We got about 15 feet and there was a juddering, sudden stop and I thought uh oh, that doesn’t sound good. Sure enough the pilot came on to say there had been a problem with the tug and they needed an engineer to assess the nose gear. After assessment we were disembarked in small groups to prevent destabilising the aircraft. The landing gear was turned through 90 degrees and looked like some collapse as well. After some waiting I was rebooked on the 1750 departure which was unsuitable for me as my VS flight to JFK was scheduled for 1545. Long story short is I am now going Aer Lingus LBA-DUB-EWR on Saturday. Managed to preserve the return legs on VS next Friday and BA next Saturday even though I haven’t flown either of the outbound sectors. £3022 one way for my Aer Lingus J flight tomorrow, thank god for business travel insurance. EC261 claim submitted, refund for today’s BA sector in process, but overall rather stressful and annoying. I’d rather not have tried to taxi, take off and most importantly tried to land on this though ...

I was rebooked by BA for the evening flight (even knew about it being cancelled and being rebooked by text message before the Swissport ground staff did), but my onward Virgin flight was a separate booking and therefore no obligation for BA to do anything for that unfortunately. Virgin couldn’t rebook me as on a restricted J ticket (unless I wanted to pay £5700 to fly on Saturday), but they did preserve the return for next Friday which was good. The timings meant I had no chance to train it or drive it in time to get to T3 for the 1545 VS flight.

Here’s my close up picture ...


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...06cc8646e.jpeg

Yes, I rather think we have made a lot more out of them than vice versa in the last 12 months since I had a curtailed trip and early return and change fees last year due to a death in the family but they paid up without a murmur.

Back at LBA this morning to go to EWR via DUB. Spotted a couple of BA engineers outside and asked them if they were here to fix G-EUPF and they are. They said it appears the tow bar snapped as we were pushing back and before the tug could stop it pushed into the landing gear and turned the wheels 90 degrees and damaged the whole assembly. They apologised on behalf of BA which I thought was a nice touch given it was Swissport handling the ground ops.