This is one of those stories where I’m not sure how to make sense of it. On October 11, CCTV video footage showed a tug driver at Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) trying to tow an Air Canada Boeing 737 MAX 8 in between two company Airbus A321s, resulting in the MAX 8 wings striking both wings of the adjacent Airbus aircraft.

The aircraft in the video were all parked to the north east side of the airport near runway 24 right. The incident took place at stand H15. If you zoom in using Google Maps, you’ll see this stand has three parking lines, that being H15A, H15 and H15B.

Usually, these bundled parking lines offer various parking combinations for small and large aircraft. While I do not know the exact specifications for this stand, my guess is a larger aircraft such as a Boeing 777 may be parked on the main line (H15), but if two smaller airplanes (such as two Airbus A321s like above) are parked next to each other, they would use H15A and H15B, with sufficient spacing between the two.

However, with those two being parked next to each other, the main H15 line becomes unusable. My guess is the ramper driving the tug was not paying attention and thought that H15 was a regularly sized stand, resulting in the collision.

It appears these stands are used to temporarily park planes before they are later repositioned to a gate for another flight, and might explain why there were no wing walkers present to alert the driver of the impending collision.