What happened
On September 28, 2007, at approximately 13:13 CDT, American Airlines flight 1400, a McDonnell Douglas DC 9 82 registered as N454AA, was performing a departure climb from Lambert St. Louis International Airport (STL) in St. Louis, Missouri. During the climb, the aircraft experienced an in-flight fire in the left engine.
While returning to STL, the flight crew discovered that the nose landing gear failed to extend. The crew performed a go-around and utilized the emergency procedure to manually extend the nose gear. Following these actions, the crew executed an emergency landing on the runway. All 143 occupants—consisting of 2 flight crewmembers, 3 flight attendants, and 138 passengers—deplaned on the runway. There were no injuries reported among the occupants, though the aircraft sustained substantial damage resulting from the engine fire.
At the time of the accident, the flight was operating under instrument flight rules (IFR) in visual meteorological conditions (VMC).