The ground incident that took place on the Apron of Alvedro airport in northwestern Spain on July 14, and that resulted in the amputation of a worker's leg is being investigated as the "lack of coordination and haste".
The operation to tow an aircraft at Alvedro Airport (A Coruña) led to the accident where the worker was trapped when trying to release the plane's parking brake and "was seriously injured by a wheel on the nose gear", resulting in the amputation of the leg.
This is stated in the preliminary information of the the Spanish Civil Aviation Accident Investigation Commission, under the Ministry of Transport of Spain, which must publish a final technical report with the conclusions, something that is expected to take a few months from now.
The incident occurred shortly before 8:00 p.m. on July 14, when the Airbus 320 aircraft operating for the company Binter "was being towed backwards with a turn on the platform to orient it to roll north towards the head of runway 21 by means of a tractor with a boom."
According to the open investigation file, there were difficulties when unhooking the push bar from the tractor by the operator.
"When trying to solve the problem, there was a certain lack of coordination and haste between the ground workers: coordinator, boom operator and tractor operator, so that several actions deviated from the operating procedures were accumulated," the investigations state.
During this process, the crew was asked to release the aircraft's parking brake and the operator driving the tractor got off the tractor. In this way, the operator, "in the attempt to release or unhook the aircraft's push bar, became trapped and a wheel of the nose gear seriously injured his leg."
The man was eventually given medical assistance at the scene and was later taken to hospital. He needed surgery due to the amputation of one leg.
The Civil Aviation Accident and Incident Investigation Commission reports that one worker was seriously injured and two others escaped unharmed.
After the incident, the operator AENA said that the worker belongs to the handling company South Europe Ground Service and specifies that he suffered the accident while he was carrying out tasks to attend to the aircraft. After receiving medical assistance at the scene of the incident, he was later transferred to Chuac.
