A United Airlines Boeing 737-800 has landed with a missing exterior panel after engineers discovered a missing lower wing panel following a short flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Wednesday. It is the second such incident for United in less than a month.
Few details of the April 10 incident have been made public, but the Federal Aviation Administration said the 25-year-old aircraft had landed safely at Harry Reid International Airport following what was otherwise a routine 50-minute flight.
It’s likely that just like the last time that a panel fell off a United plane, the pilots had no idea what had happened, meaning that there was no declared emergency and the passengers were none the wiser to the damage to the aircraft.
It was only during a routine post-flight inspection that engineers discovered the missing lower wing panel on flight UA1960.
Unsurprisingly, the aircraft (registration: N24224) had to be taken out of service…