In the last 30 minutes, a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles suffered a fuel leak on arrival into the airport, forcing a runway closure.
Incident: Southwest Flight Suffers Fuel Leak On Arrival to Los Angeles…
It is understood that WN1695 was the flight affected by this fuel leak into Los Angeles, which was operated by N773SA, one of Southwest’s Boeing 737-700 aircraft.
As per data from Planespotters.net, N773SA is a 23.3 year old Boeing 737-700 that was delivered to the carrier back in July 2000.
Southwest Airlines has a fleet of 404 Boeing 737-700 aircraft, with an average fleet age of 18.3 years.
Below are some tweets regarding the incident in Los Angeles.
The aircraft did not declare an emergency during this ordeal, but has been documented in the airport by LA Flights Live on YouTube.
According to authorities, smoke was seen on landing, with the emergency stairs deployed, but the problem wasn’t serious enough to cause an evacuation on the runway.
For a brief period of time, Runway 24L at Los Angeles International Airport was closed, before the Southwest flight was taken off the runway and headed to a stand to disembark the passengers.
At this stage, it is unclear how serious the issue is onboard the aircraft, as maintenance technicians will need to take a look at the aircraft to establish what repairs will need to be made to make the aircraft airworthy again.
This remains a developing story. AviationSource will approach Southwest Airlines for a comment on this incident that happened at the airport.
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