Five people were injured on Friday night after an American Airlines plane struck a shuttle bus at Los Angeles International Airport in California, officials said, in what was the latest in a string of unusual incidents at major airports in the past four weeks.
The plane, an Airbus A321, had no passengers and was being towed on a taxiway around 10 p.m. local time when it hit a bus that was transporting passengers between terminals, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Emergency medical workers treated five people who were involved in the “low-speed” collision, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
Four people were hospitalized. The tug driver who had been towing the jet was taken to the hospital in moderate condition, and the bus driver and two bus passengers were transported in fair condition, the Fire Department said. Only one person was on the plane, a worker, who declined to be taken to the hospital after receiving treatment, the department said.
American Airlines said that the airplane was not operating as a commercial flight when the collision happened and that no customers had been onboard.
The jet was being towed from a gate to a parking area. Other airport operations remained normal, the airport said in a statement.
The F.A.A. said that it would investigate the collision, which follows a recent spate of unusual incidents at major airports.
On Feb. 4, two airplanes narrowly avoided a collision at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas after a FedEx cargo plane aborted its landing on the same runway that a Southwest Airlines flight had been cleared to take off from.
The day before, a United Airlines Boeing 787 that was being towed clipped the wing of a parked United plane, a Boeing 757-200, at Newark Liberty International Airport, the F.A.A. said. No one was injured and airport operations were not affected, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said.
And last month, at Kennedy International Airport in New York, a Delta Air Lines plane had to abort its takeoff after an American Airlines plane crossed about 1,000 feet in front of it, the F.A.A. said. The National Transportation Safety Board said on Friday that it had subpoenaed the pilots of the American Airlines plane after they declined its request for electronically recorded interviews.
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