A United Airlines flight that took off from San Francisco International Airport Friday morning landed in Oregon with a missing external panel, according to officials.
United says the missing panel wasn’t discovered until the plane landed safely in Medford and that pilots had no idea during the flight that something had happened.
I was in a skydiving school one time when their twin otter came back with a piece of plywood stuck in the tail. While looking at the tail one guy said “what are the odds of that; that we would be flying around and hit that random piece of plywood that’s up there in the sky.” I had to explain that there weren’t just random pieces of plywood up in the sky and they needed to look over the airplane to see where that came from. Turns out the emergency hatch on the top had delaminated. The interior panel was still in place but the exterior panel was gone and this plywood piece had stuck in the vertical stabilizer.