In the third incident of its kind in two months, the landing gear of a Scandinavian airlines (SAS) propeller plane broke while landing at Copenhagen airport Saturday, but there were no injuries among the 40 persons on board, DPA reported. Officials said the plane involved was a Dash-8 Q-400, the same type of plane which saw landing gear failures at the Danish airport Aalborg in mid-September, followed a few days later in Vilnius, Lithuania. After that second accident, a flying ban on all 27 of the Dash planes in the SAS fleet was issued. As in the previous two accidents, on Saturday the Dash plane slid out of control after landing. The accident blocked one of Copenhagen's two runways until the evening hours. A spokesman for the Scandinavian airline expressed the company's "deep regret" about the accident. Danish civil aviation authorities immediately ordered a new flying ban for the Dash-8, which is built by the Canadian firm Bombardier. After the first two accidents, SAS had inspected all the landing gear on the remaining 25 Dash-8 planes in the fleet and found signs of corrosion. The airline then completely exchanged all the landing gears, with aviation authorities then giving the green light for SAS to resume services with the plane.
