Seconds into their takeoff roll at Cologne/Bonn Airport, the crew of the ATR 72-212 felt “several blows to the airplane” and realized that objects they could not identify were flying off the ATR 72, the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) said in its final report on the April 27, 2020, serious incident.
The pilots rejected the takeoff for their planned cargo flight to Sofia, Bulgaria, and returned the airplane to its assigned parking position, unsure of what had just occurred.
The BFU’s investigation found that, in the early morning darkness, the pilots had “confused the left runway edge marking and lighting of Runway 6 … with the centreline and therefore had aligned the airplane, unnoticed, with the wrong runway lighting for takeoff.”
The “blows to the airplane” had been caused by the left runway edge lights hitting parts of the fuselage, the nose landing gear and the propeller blades as the airplane began the takeof…
