Two planes collide at Newark Airport

(Newark-WABC, October 31, 2006) (WABC) -- Two planes collided on the ground at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday night. Officials say one plane was preparing to take off when it hit the wing of another plane on the taxiway.

The mangled left wing of this Lufthansa 747 clearly tells the story of a major mishap. According to the Port Authority, as the Frankfurt-bound plane taxied out for takeoff it clipped the right wing of an empty Continental plane that was under tow.

Ron Watson sat right beside the wing.

"It jerked the plane a little to the left and you knew something had hit it," Ron said.

"It almost sounded like, oops, we ran over some baggage and it wasn't. We sat for about a half hour before the captain said another plane had clipped his wing, " Kim Takal, a passenger, said.

Actually, the Port Authority says it was the Lufthansa jetliner that hit the stationary Continental plane. There were 291 passengers and 17 crew members on board the Lufthansa plane. No one was injured.

One woman told us she watched the Lufthansa wing barely miss the rear, smaller wing of the Continental plane. Moments later ...

"Next wing that ... Lufthansa wing is down, it's like this and then going up," passenger Rajitha Mallela said.

"You could see the tip of the wing, a fairly large piece of metal sticking up and the flight attendant said there was a 2-foot gash where the metal was missing," Takal said.

This taxiway collision comes just days after another Continental flight landed at Newark on a taxiway instead of a runway.

To read Jim Hoffer's report on that story, Click Here.

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