A Corendon Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 clipped a firefighting vehicle with its left wingtip while taxiing toward departure at Friedrichshafen Airport on the evening of September 30, 2026, German police and the airport said. Nobody was hurt. Police estimated damage at about €300,000, and the Turkish leisure carrier’s Friedrichshafen–Antalya flight left hours late on a replacement jet.
Airport officials identified the aircraft as a Corendon 737 MAX 8 that was due to fly to Antalya with 189 passengers plus crew. After the collision the jet taxied back to its parking stand under its own power. The left winglet was damaged. Registration TC-MKD was cited in contemporaneous social video shared by AirwayBuzz and summarized by aero.de on October 1, 2026.
A police spokesman told German media the aircraft’s wing struck a firefighting truck while the jet was on its way to the runway. Friedrichshafen Airport said the incident is under investigation by the competent authorities and that it could not yet comment on the exact sequence or cause. That leaves open whether the ARFF vehicle was stationary, moving, or positioned for a routine standby when contact occurred on the taxiway.
Passengers eventually continued to Antalya on a substitute aircraft after roughly five hours’ delay, airport spokesman Bernd Behrend said. The late departure required an exception to the local night-flying curfew. Behrend apologized for the disruption and said staff ordered large amounts of pizza and drinks for the waiting hall while the airline arranged the replacement frame.
Wingtip and winglet strikes during ground movement are a recurring airport hazard worldwide, especially on crowded aprons where service vehicles share taxi routes with large wingspans. They are rarely catastrophic when speeds are low, but they ground the damaged aircraft until structural and systems checks clear the wing. In this case the MAX 8 could not continue the Antalya sector and had to be swapped out of the night’s flying program.
Corendon Airlines operates leisure networks between Turkey, Germany and other European holiday markets, with Friedrichshafen among its seasonal German gateways to Antalya. The airline had not issued a detailed public technical statement in the aero.de account beyond the airport’s confirmation of type, route and passenger count. Until investigators finish, the factual record stops at a wingtip-to-ARFF contact, no injuries, quantified damage estimates, and a five-hour delayed departure on another jet.
Lake Constance airports handle a mix of leisure charters and regional traffic, so an evening Antalya bank is a familiar pattern for Corendon in the German market. A grounded MAX 8 on the night of departure forces exactly the scramble Friedrichshafen described: find another airframe, win a curfew exception, and keep nearly two hundred people fed until pushback. That operational story is as important as the wingtip photograph.
For travelers, the practical takeaway is ordinary disruption management: rebooking onto a replacement aircraft, night-curfew coordination, and ground hospitality while engineers inspect the damaged MAX 8. For the industry, it is another reminder that ground collisions remain a material risk even on modern 737 MAX fleets when wingspans and vehicle paths intersect on the taxiway. Official reports will clarify blame; the passenger outcome already did—everyone flew, just much later than planned.
Sources: aero.de
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