Virgin Blue Airlines Boeing 737 8FE incident
Boeing 737 8FE · Incident: aircraft structural failure during landing
From Adelaide International Airport (ADL) to Melbourne Airport (MEL)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's date. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ENG10WA004
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
Boeing 737 8FE
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- VH-VUI
- Operator
- Virgin Blue Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Adelaide International Airport (ADL), AdelaideTo Melbourne Airport (MEL), Melbourne Airport
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Non-U.S., Commercial
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Aircraft structural failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Melbourne Airport, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
On October 20, 2009, at 0900 local time, a Virgin Blue Airlines Boeing 737-800 airplane, registration VH-VUI, experienced a failure of the right main landing gear outboard wheel assembly during landing at Melbourne Airport in Melbourne, Australia. No one was injured on the scheduled domestic flight. The airplane suffered minor damage.
The incident is being investigated by the Australian Transport Safety Board. Further information pertaining to this incident may be obtained from: Australian Transport Safety Board 62 Northbourne Avenue Canberra ACT 2601 Tel: (02) 6257 4150 Fax: (02) 6247 3117 www.atsb.gov.au
This report is for informational purposes only and contains only information obtained for, or released by, the Government of Australia.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ENG10WA004
- Event ID
- 20091123X11730
- Case number
- ENG10WA004
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the UTC date the NTSB stores; the local time zone is not recorded, so the local date may differ by a day.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 177a6562a201384dc33247a5b287e0e2e4edcc2ffc88693059a57db7ace5b188; retrieved 2026-09-15T13:30:48.782Z.