Jazeera Airways A320 ‘damaged by balloon cable

A Kuwaiti hybrid carrier Jazeera Airways Airbus A320 sustained serious damage to an engine nacelle after it apparently struck a cable holding a military aerostat.

The aircraft, approaching Kuwait International Airport at the end of a flight from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Aug. 27, was said by the airline to “have had a minor mid-air interception with a foreign object.”

The airline added the flight continued safely to its conclusion; nobody was injured and the passengers disembarked as normal. It said examination of the airframe had identified damage on engine #2 and repairs were being undertaken. An investigation into the incident is underway by Kuwaiti regulator, the Directorate General for Civil Aviation.

Inquiries to Jazeera were referred to an incident report in the Aviation Herald, which said the aircraft, 9K-CAK, was in a holding pattern at around 5,000 ft. at waypoint IVETA when the right-hand engine hit the cable, slicing into the front of the engine nacelle but apparently not damaging the fan blades.

Film clips from Kuwait show what appear to be a large balloon rapidly falling to the ground, followed by shots of hundreds of meters of cable strewn across a desert road and people examining the wreckage of the tethered balloon.

Images elsewhere on the Aviation Herald website show deep incisions into two points of the front of the nacelle and ripped panels elsewhere on its structure.