A Pegasus Airlines plane carrying 168 passengers and crew members skidded off the runway and teetered on a slope on Saturday before everyone was safely evacuated, the Huffington Post reports. The airplane veered off the runway as it was trying to land at Turkey’s Trabzon Airport and ran down the nearby slope that led to the Black Sea.
The airline released a statement apologizing for the incident, saying that the flight had a “Runaway Excursion incident during landing…All 162 passengers, 2 pilots and 4 cabin crew have been disembarked safely from the aircraft. There has been no loss of life or injury to anyone on-board.”
Photos of the trapped plane show the aircraft’s tip scarily close to the Black Sea below.
Pegasus Airlines plane skidded off the runway at Trabzon Airport pic.twitter.com/txGzCoX9IZ
— Gautam Trivedi (@Gotham3) January 14, 2018
The Boeing 737 craft was flying from Ankara, Turkey’s capital, to Trabzon that night. Following the close call, the airport closed for a few hours to investigate the skidding’s cause, but was reopened by Sunday. The Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu reported that passengers were panicked as the plane began to move off course. Passenger Fatma Gordu told Anadolu, “We tilted to the side, the front was down while the plane’s rear was up. There was panic; people shouting, screaming.”
Remarkably, no one was hurt in the accident. As of Sunday afternoon, a precise cause of the plane’s difficulties has yet to be reported.