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Keith McCord Reporting"And you knew something was wrong. There was a big, bang, bang, bang, and we ended up in the dirt."
Some anxious moments for passengers on their way to Salt Lake this morning. The Delta Airlines flight was scheduled to leave Cincinnati just after 7 o'clock. There were about 30 passengers on it when the front nose wheel skidded off the pavement.
This was a relatively minor incident. Flight 1060 was taxiing and the pilot was making the turn onto the main runway. That's when passengers knew something wasn't right.
Passenger: "And as we were rounding the curve to get on the main taxiway, the plane just slid out, like a guy going around a curve too fast for icy conditions. We just slid out."
The nose wheel on the Delta 737 came to rest in the dirt along the side of the runway. It was a foggy morning at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Airport; despite the wintry conditions, airport officials do not believe weather was a factor here.
Ted Bushelmann, Airport Spokesman: “Now we’re not sure why it happened. The runways were perfectly clean, no ice or anything of that nature.”
Peter Fried of Cincinnati was on the plane and said everyone was clam. He said the whole event lasted only a few seconds. Emergency crews and Delta employees were on the scene quickly.
Passenger: "They got a bus and took us from our flight directly to another flight. We went right to it. There was another flight to Salt Lake City within an hour's time."
By the time Peter Fried arrived in Salt Lake for a ski vacation, the original plane had already been towed off the runway and to a hangar for inspection. It was a slight inconvenience today for a handful of people, but everyone still reached their destinations.
"The only issue of terror, those people in first class, who recognized that on the next flight there was a very slim likelihood that they would be flying out first class (laugh)."
Delta is still investigating the incident and interviewing the pilots. There was some early speculation that there may have been a problem with the front wheel assembly on the plane that may have caused it to veer from the runway, but nothing has been confirmed on that yet.
