The landing gear of a Southwest Airlines jet collapsed after it landed at New York's La Guardia Airport Monday evening, injuring more than 10 people onboard and temporarily closing one of the nation's busiest airports, authorities said.
The Boeing 737, with 149 people on board including the crew, had just landed at LaGuardia around 5:40 p.m. when the nose-gear failed, authorities said. It was landing after a roughly two-hour flight from Nashville International Airport, authorities said.
Bobby Abtahi via Twitter A photo of the plane on the tarmac.
Six passengers and at least three crew members were transported to a local hospital for back and neck pain, and four were treated at the scene, said a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. Four other passengers suffered anxiety attacks. Authorities said the plane didn't catch on fire.
The Port Authority spokesman said the plane had just landed and was taxiing when a front wheel apparently popped off. Southwest Airlines said witnesses reported seeing the nose gear collapse "upon landing," while the Federal Aviation Administration said the wheels failed "shortly after" the plane landed.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending an investigator to New York on Monday night.
The incident caused delays for dozens of flights in and out of La Guardia Airport, with delays rippling out across the country, authorities said. By about 7:06 p.m., authorities had opened one of the airport's two runways.
Reuters A Southwest Airlines plane sits on the tarmac as passengers disembark at La Guardia Airport.
Matt Lewis, 48, a software salesman from Matthews, N.C., said he was on a US Airways flight that was about to take off for Charlotte when his plane was grounded and more than a dozen other planes were brought to a dead halt in and around the runway.
"It looked like it just crumbled on impact," Mr. Lewis said of the airliner's nose landing gear.
Overall, air travel in recent years has had its strongest safety record since the dawn of the jet age. The incident at LaGuardia comes after a recent cluster of high-profile commercial aviation accidents in July, including the crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that killed three in San Francisco, a fire aboard a parked and empty Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner at Heathrow Airport in London and a gear-up landing of a Russian Sukhoi regional jet on a test flight in Iceland on Sunday that injured one of the five aboard.
—Jon Ostrower contributed to this article. Write to Ted Mann at ted.mann@wsj.com and Pervaiz Shallwani at pervaiz.shallwani@dowjones.com
