Structural Issue, Not Birds, Caused Dent

*Update* From Twincities.com: Don’t blame the birds. After a Northwest Airlines flight landed at Tampa Intl Airport Sunday with a sizable dent in its nose cone, impact with a bird quickly became the leading theory. On Tuesday, the FAA said that it doesn’t appear there was a collision with a bird — or anything else. “It appears to be an internal structural failure,” said Elizabeth Cory, a spokeswoman for the FAA. Officials are trying to determine why it failed from the inside, she said. The Boeing 757 was flying from Detroit to Tampa on Sunday. An FAA spokeswoman told a Florida television station that the pilots heard a bang at 18,000 feet during the approach to Tampa, but there was little other information to explain the huge dent. The plane landed without incident and no one was injured.
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