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An investigation is under way to discover why a minor collision between two aircraft happened last week at Manchester airport. A Futura Boeing 737 bound for Tenerife hit a Lufthansa Airbus A320 headed for Frankfurt. Both planes were due to take off within minutes of each other from Terminal 1.

Almost three hundred passengers were on board the planes but fortunately no-one was hurt and, after the aircraft had been inspected by the fire services, the passengers were able to disembark in the normal way, hoping to be able to get on with their holidays later in the day.

The collision happened between the wing tip of the Futura plane and the tail of the Lufthansa aircraft and both ended up with structural damage which will cost millions to repair. Although costly in terms of economics, it seems that airport officials were relatively unconcerned by the collision, describing it as “a fairly minor incident”.

The airport is said to be arranged in such a way that this sort of incident should not have happened and it is hoped that the investigation will get to the bottom of the cause quickly. There have been reports that one of the pilots was instructed not to proceed but ignored the warning.

A similar incident happened at Manchester in 2004, again when both planes were getting ready for take-off. David Learmount of Air Transport Intelligence said that incidents of planes clipping each other at airports were relatively common, although injuries as a result are thankfully extremely rare.