https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2025/08/17/frontier-air-plane-damaged-after-air-conditioning-hose-gets-sucked-into-engine/Passengers on board a Frontier Airlines flight from Charlotte to LaGuardia faced a lengthy delay on Saturday after an air conditioning hose got sucked into one of the two engines of the Airbus A320, which was due to operate the flight.
Frontier flight 3134 had already boarded passengers on Saturday morning when eyewitnesses caught the extraordinary moment that the ground air supply hose was sucked into the engine. “That engine’s fried, I think,” one passenger said in a video that showed a disintegrated part of the hose spinning around the fan blades of the left-hand engine of the five-year-old aircraft.
“We’re not getting on this flight… this flight isn’t taking off,” the man says in the video.
According to the Facebook group Flight Secrets Exposed, the aircraft was due to depart Charlotte at 9:55 am on August 16, but the airline eventually decided to deplane everyone back into the terminal while they worked out what to do next.
Unfortunately, any chance of a quick fix was nonexistent, so Frontier had to scramble to find a replacement aircraft to get passengers to New York.
In the end, a new plane couldn’t be sourced until around 7 pm, when the passengers boarded another aircraft, arriving in LaGuardia with a delay of around nine hours.
During the hot summer months, ground power air conditioning units are an absolute essential, pumping cooled air into the plane while the engines are switched off and the aircraft doesn’t have its own air conditioning systems working.
The cooled air is supplied from large hoses that connect to a special port in the underbelly of the aircraft. Sometimes, these hoses are connected to the jetbridge, or in some cases, boxes located close to the aircraft.
As you can imagine, the aircraft has been removed from service for at least the next few days while engineers work out how much damage has been caused to the engine.
