The Boeing jet that dropped an emergency slide after taking off from JFK Airport on Friday is 33 years old — well past the typical retirement age for a commercial jetliner, according to aviation experts.
The chute from Delta Flight 520 had detached from a panel above the right wing shortly after the Los Angeles-bound plane took off from JFK Airport in New York last Friday. The deflated slide was recovered Sunday after it washed up on the Rockaway peninsula, about six miles from JFK, as The Post exclusively reported.
According to data from Airfleets.net, the Boeing-made 767 jet is 33 years old — above a passenger plane’s typical lifespan of 20 to 25 years, longtime commercial pilot Scott Miller told The Post.
He said Boeing stopped delivering its 767 passenger planes a decade ago, though this model is still being used by the US military.
Miller said the incident was likely due to a latch failure, as the aging Boeing 767 only deploys the slide when the emergency exit door over the wing is open.
He declined to speculate whether the freak accident was because of the plane’s age or because Delta’s maintenance crew failed to realize there was a faulty latch before takeoff.
In either case, Miller pointed the finger at Delta for the mishap — and cleared Boeing of any possible fault like the company suffered after the near-disastrous fuselage blowout on an Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane earlier this year.
“Once an airplane leaves the manufacturer, Delta is responsible for maintenance and upkeep. It works like a car dealership,” said Miller, who also lectures at San Jose State University.
Former pilot Richard Levy, who flew for American Airlines for 41 years, agreed with that assessment.
“This emergency exit coming open does not happen in a vacuum,” Levy said.
“The question is who did maintenance on that airplane, and who specifically did any maintenance on the cover to the emergency overwing exits and when. Thats what the FAA will be looking at.”
Delta has said it is fully cooperating with the Federal Aviation Administration “as nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and people.”
The National Transportation Safety Board told The Post that it’s “collecting information about the event, but have not launched an investigation.”
The 33-year-old plane is one of 44 Boeing 767-300s in Delta’s fleet of 963 aircraft, according to a March 31 public fling.
Delta’s 767s have an average age of 28 years, compared to the entire fleet’s average of 14.9 years, the filing shows.
“The airplane in question here – the warranty on that airplane expired a number of years ago,” Doug Drury, Head of Aviation at Central Queensland University in Australia, told The Post.
This wasn’t the first chute incident suffered by Delta’s fleet of 767s.
Last June, another Delta Flight 520 taking the same route from JFK to Los Angeles was diverted to Utah due to what the Atlanta-based carrier dubbed a “maintenance issue” at the time.
Just moments after it touched the ground, the slide at the rear of the cabin accidentally deployed inside the plane, shooting a panel door at a crew member, who was then taken to the hospital, The Post earlier reported.
Sources said at the time that the plane’s catering crew had accidentally caused the slide to explode “like an airbag.”
This was not the same Boeing 767 plane, as flight numbers are attached to the same routes, rather than aircrafts, a source close to the situation said.
The 2023 incident was a matter of human error as the slides hadn’t been disarmed by the flight attendant prior to opening the door on arrival, the source said.
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