Austrian Arrows emergency landing over cabin pressure drop

Austrian Airlines (AUA) has been forced to carry out a second emergency descent within a week.The Aviation Herald reports today (Fri) that a Fokker 70 jet operated by AUA subsidiary firm Austrian Arrows returned to Vienna International Airport (VIA) for a safe landing after loss of cabin pressure was detected by its crew yesterday.Technical problems of the aircraft – which was bound for Lyon in France – resulted in a release of the passenger oxygen masks, according to the report. A replacement Fokker 100 touched down in Lyon two hours after the scheduled landing time.The affected Fokker 70 plane will undergo a check-up.Only on Thursday of last week, pilots of an AUA aeroplane bound for VIA decided to return to Franz Josef Strauss International Airport in Munich in Germany as one of the Fokker 70 jet’s wheels dropped off shortly after takeoff.In another incident involving a Fokker jet operated by AUA, pilots were wrongly informed by cockpit displays about problems with the landing gear on a flight from Vienna to Minsk, Belarus, last November.AUA, which was acquired by German aviation giant Lufthansa in September 2009, announced yesterday that it had 649,000 passengers in February. The firm explained this was a 1.6 per cent decline compared to the same month of 2010.