Delta Boeing 757 plane loses nose wheel: Retired pilot weighs in

ATLANTA - Just before a Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 began its takeoff roll down the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport runway Saturday morning, a warning sounded over the radio.

Pilot warns Delta crew about lost nose wheel

"This is the aircraft looking at you, one of your nose tires just came off and rolled down the runway behind you," a pilot in another plane could be heard saying on an air traffic control recording.

Airplane nose wheel and tire

The Boeing 757 bound for Colombia stopped in its tracks after one of its nose wheels came off. The crew in command was unaware until a fellow Delta pilot spoke up.

"Tower, I'm going to contact our maintenance folks to see if we can get a tow in," the pilot of the plane told Atlanta controllers.

Is there a problem with Boeing airplanes?

"A landing gear problem happens for various reasons, the sensors in the gear don't work, but for a tire to actually just fall off like that is extremely rare," said Paul Carr, a retired Delta captain with decades of flight deck experience.

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Carr says this is likely a maintenance issue and not a problem with the Boeing plane. He says from a safety perspective he is glad it happened during taxi and not takeoff or landing.

Airplane nose wheel and tire

"They know how to handle emergencies like that, but if they had lost it in flight, somehow they would have come back and they would have landed," he said. "Done some equipment damage, but everybody would have been fine."

Delta apologized to customers and said it put them onto a replacement plane to Bogota. As for the missing tire, it was eventually found.

"We have located a tire," a person told the controller. "You have located the tire," the controller responded. "Yes sir, it was in the safety area on the south shoulder," the operations official responded. "Roger, we didn’t know if it made it all the way to 285," the controller responded.

Investigators say the runway where this happened was shut down for several hours.  

At this point, it is unclear what caused the wheel to come off the plane, but the FAA told FOX 5 Atlanta they are now investigating.