A potentially deadly chunk of a Tokyo-bound jumbo jet made an unscheduled layover in Long Island — crash-landing by a family’s driveway, sources said yesterday.
The 3-by-4-foot engine tail cone from a Delta Airlines 777 smashed through a tree outside James and Michelle Russell’s home, bounced off the pavement and came to a halt up against the family’s car Thursday afternoon.
“If you think about it, the kids could have been outside playing, someone could have been walking down the street,” said a shaken Michelle Russell.
“I mean, that’s beside the fact that it could have come thorough our roof.”
The cone fell off shortly after the Northwest/Delta flight took off from JFK Airport at 2:30 p.m., according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Only after the plane had landed safely at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport did the pilots discover, during a routine inspection, that they had lost something.
Missing the cone, which helps with fuel efficiency, in no way affected the pilots’ ability to fly the plane, the airline noted.
The Russells, meanwhile, must have felt like the sky was falling when they got back to their Cape Cod house in Roosevelt at about 5:30 p.m. from a doctor’s appointment. At first, they had no idea what the uninvited object on their front lawn might be.
“It looked like a piece of sheet metal,” said Michelle, 53, “until my husband went to move it. At that point, it looked like a giant ice cream cone that was silver.”
Make that a heavy ice cream cone, said her husband, James, 59, estimating that the piece weighed about as much as two car tires on rims.
Michelle added that she had been thinking of flying down to Disney World with their daughter, Glastine, 5, but that she was having second thoughts.
“When a plane takes off from one destination to go to the next, it should land with the parts it took off with,” she said.
“Really — think about it — that could be an essential part of the plane. It’s down here, and you’re still up there.
“That’s not a good thing.”