Piece Of Jet’s Tail Interrupts Teen Tennis Match Panel Plummets To Ground Near Players, Spectators

A piece of metal from the tail of a Delta Airlines jet fell several thousand feet onto a tennis court during a high school tennis match but nobody was hurt, authorities say.

The incident happened Monday afternoon at a tennis field at Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, a suburb about 15 miles south of Seattle and just a few miles south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

“A small metal fragment fell out of the sky. It landed about 18 feet away from the nearest tennis player during a tennis match,” Principal Peter Ways said Tuesday.

Several students and adults were on the field at the time, Ways said.

Dick Meyer, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, said the fragment hit a chain-link fence and bounced off. He said the piece was 27 inches long and 7 1/2 inches wide and fell from a Delta Airlines Boeing 727 flight that had just departed Sea-Tac for Los Angeles.

The piece, made of an aluminumlike composite material, came from the skin of the plane by the top of the tail, Meyer said. He described the piece as a “panel that fits in some grooves and slides up and down and allows access into the interior of the tail part for maintenance.”

“It’s not a critical control surface, so there was no danger to passengers on board. In fact, the pilot probably wouldn’t have even felt it fall off,” Meyer said.

But he said it could have caused serious injury had it hit someone on the ground, since the plane was likely several thousand feet in the air.

The plane landed safely at Los Angeles International. A Delta maintenance crew noticed the piece was missing and replaced it, Meyer said. The plane was returned to service.

A Delta spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday night.

Meyer said FAA and Delta investigators will check to see if the incident “is a fluke, if it happened one time or if there’s other cases in statistical files of this part having a problem.”

Parts falling off airplanes are rare, and in most cases nobody’s around to see it, Meyer said.