A pilot’s handbag placed on a control panel in the cockpit of an Airbus A320 accidentally switched on a parking brake, with unintended consequences.
A leaked memo quoted by aviation site Aerotime Hub suggests that the placement of a pilot’s handbag led to an incident where a Ural Airlines plane blew its tyres on landing at Irkutsk Airport (IKT) in Siberia last month.
Ural Airlines is a Russian carrier based in Yekaterinburg that operates scheduled and chartered domestic and international flights out of Koltsovo International Airport.
The handbag incident is said to have affected flight U62942 between Dushanbe (DYU) and Irkutsk on 2 November 2022.
The document cited by Aerotime Hub indicates the pilot placed a handbag on a control panel and the bag’s strap accidentally switched on a parking brake while the aircraft was flying at 40,000 feet.
The parking brake light turned on at high altitude and again at 1476 feet (450 metres) on landing approach. Crew had turned the parking brake off after the light appeared but apparently a problem persisted with residual parking brake pressure.
The brakes jammed on landing, causing the main landing gear’s four tyres to blow out and damaging the runway, Moscow weekly newspaper Argumenty I Fakty stated.
“It took the services 12 hours to remove the aircraft and fix the damage, paralysing the airport and causing at least 14 incoming flights to be redirected,” Aerotime Hub related.
Ural Airlines said the incident was caused by a malfunction of the braking system.
While the gender of the pilot was not disclosed in the report, any pilot with a Russian airline carrying a handbag is almost certainly female. British Airways recently authorised its male pilots to carry handbags, wear lipstick, mascara, earrings and false eyelashes if they wished, but Russia has more traditional views on gender. Civil aviation in Russia employs over 70,000 women, including some 200 pilots and first officers.
Written by Peter Needham
