Thankfully the plane didn’t go anywhere, or else I suppose we would have heard about it on the news. The owner of this plane was not so lucky.
ISTR seeing pictures of planes with their wingtips chained to anchors in the tarmac, which I imagine would have saved the plane in the last video. Assuming those are not available, how do you secure a plane when high winds are a possibility? Can you lock the control yoke in a forward position so that a headwind doesn’t tend to make the nose pitch up? Would this also be possible/advisable for the 747 seen in my first links?
With fighter aircraft they tie them down with chains, and I imagine you could do the same with an airliner as long as you have the hardpoints and tiedowns on the tarmac to do so…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airliner tied down. Is it done anywhere, at any time, or are freak conditions like that in the video just so rare that it’s not considered necessary?
I admit that tying down a heavy seems about like putting a safety strap on the pyramids… but okay, I guess it’s a necessity sometimes.
AIUI the airlines mostly depend on forecasting - they just don’t take planes into airports that are about to get hit.
Get stuck anyway and there’s not much else they can do, other than to leave the spoilers deployed to kill wing lift. A couple of ropes aren’t going to help.
Little planes if you have warning enough but not enough to move them x country:
Usual stuff:
Good tie downs, control locks & gust locks including the old fashioned ones of two padded boards with a bolt in the middle.
A 2X4 strapped to both wings at about the apex of the top curve of the wing to kill lift like spoilers do on the big boys.
In Corpus Christie, get in the hurricane proof hanger if you can.
In the US, usually nuff warning on big storms like hurricanes to move the aircraft inland.
Islands in the Western Pacific, not so much…
A Tornado, = Rut Row, need insurance company phone number…
As said before, you can moor an aircraft to the ground with ropes and chains.
It also helps to have the aircraft fully fueled especially for larger aircraft.
I know that there were provisions on the DC-9 to moor it; however, I never did so when working on them. We’d fly out those aircraft that could and put those that couldn’t fly into a hanger if weather was going to be that bad.
Around here even small airplanes are chained down, but you can still get to a point where the winds rip the whole thing out of the ground (tornado, for example, or hurricane).
Never heard of tying down a big jumbo - if the wind is fast enough over the wing to lift the airplane it’s exerting many tons of force upwards, you’d need some truly massive chains to resist that.
Usual procedure is to move airplanes that big out of the way of the storm.
There’s no provision for tying down big jets. You simply take them someplace else for a few hours.
Also, in the OP’s videos we see the nose gear bouncing up & down, not the main gear as he wrote. The mains stay firmly planted and show no signs of even extending a little bit.
Conversely, even when it’s not bouncing, we see the nose strut fully extended. That may be due to the way the wind is blowing, or it may be due to the ground crew not properly ballasting the aircraft (with golf balls or whatever).
An empty big jet is very light on the nose gear. Some types are even in danger of sitting on their tail in no wind if you load just a small weight aft before loading more weight forward. Before towing, taxiing, much less to flying an empty airplane most types need to add ballast. This is normally just fuel but distributed differently than normal to drive extra weight onto the nose.
Bottom line: Not surprising, not a crisis, but also not smart work by the ground crew, and definitely the seeds of what could have gotten much more expensive. The usual way that gets more expensive is when the jet pivots about the main gear once the nose gear is mostly airborne. When it pivots it strikes adjacent aircraft, gate equipment, work stands, vehicles, etc.
Just tail-sitting will provoke a maintenance inspection, but there’s a skid back there because dragging the tail on takeoff is a risk in daily ops. The skid and the beefed up structure supporting it are meant to deal with more dynamic impacts than just tipping backwards. There’s no guarantee of zero damage in a tail-sitting incident, but unlike the pivot-into-obstacle scenario, there can be a tail-sit incident with no damage.
I slid past (i.e. missed) the first mention and totally keyed off the second. Had I seen both I’d probably have understood what you meant. Like I say on most of my edits, tpying is hrad.
Not true. There are tethering procedures for the nose gear and they are used when a tail stand is not available when loading cargo. You are correct that the ideal situation is to move the plane away from danger that isn’t possible if it has a mechanical. The plane in the video should have been better secured.
As for small planes the op got it in one. In a plane with standard yokes it’s a simple thing to take bungee cords and cross hook them to the rudder pedals. that pulls the elevator into a nose down attitude and keeps all the control surfaces from banging against their stops.
Maybe it depends on the aircraft. Ours has no provision for being tied down at the nose and it is a cargo jet. Not only does it have no provision for being tied down but none of the parking bays we go to have any provision for tie downs. If we don’t have a tail stand then we don’t load.
When I was living and working in the cyclone prone areas of Australia we would just evacuate our aircraft away from the coast (which is where the worst of the weather is) if a cyclone was going to cause a problem.
A bit extreme, you could set the flaps, tabs, spoilers, slats, ailerons, flaperons ,brake , reverse surfaces… to kill lift much more effectively than ice.
There are devices called gustlocks that physically immobilize the flight surfaces of aircraft. Kind of important to remove them before flight, though - if you don’t you won’t be able to steer once you’re off the ground. We call that Having A Bad Day.
Let’s not mix locking the control surfaces to prevent them flapping with attaching the aircraft to the ground to prevent moving. Two totally different, and ultimately totally unrelated, issues.
Over the years I have flown 6 flavors of big jets from two unrelated manufacturers. None had tie-down points. None of our normal parking places have tie-down points. Could somebody pass a rope through a gear leg brace and attach it to a loop embedded in a ramp someplace? Sure. Would that be strong enough to hold an aircraft down in a hurricane / typhoon / cyclone? I have no clue and neither do you, because the answer would depend on the specifics of the tie-down set in the concrete, abrasion details on the rope / chain, strength and duration of storm, etc.
Are there some cargo carriers someplace that tie down big jet noses while loading? Beats heck out of me. I’d be surprised, but it wouldn’t be the first time something in aviation surprised me. I’ve certainly seen any number of tail stands under cargo DC8s and 727s over the years. I’ve not seen nose tie-downs, but that may simply be that they’re small enough to not be obvious when attached to a 747, MD11, 767, A300 or other common modern era cargo hauler.
In a hurricane / typhoon / cyclone, one of the challenges is that the wind isn’t from a consistent direction.
As an example, with wind from tail-to-nose, flaps down helps hold the aircraft down to the ground. Once the wind reverses to nose-to-tail, the down flaps help it fly. Oops.
To be sure, some things are lift-reducing regardless of direction. But actually setting those up and leaving them there on an aircraft with powered controls is not simple mechanically. e.g. with hydraulic power on the aircraft I can raise spoilers / speedbrakes. What happens to them when I remove hydraulic power? Typically they’ll sink back to flush within a couple hours.
You also have to balance the risk of damaging these surfaces with the risk of damaging the aircraft if the wind moves it. e.g. spoilers up is lift-dumping regardless of wind direction. But spoilers up greatly increases the odds of them being damaged by flying debris, or overstress from wind in the reverse-to-normal direction, or uncontrolled flapping when they’re partly retracted due to absence of hydraulic pressure. How do you handicap which risk is the best to avoid? Maybe the maintenance manuals have a least-risk plan and maybe they don’t. I sure don’t know for the stuff I fly.
I imagine that tying any airplane down in heavy winds runs quite a risk of pranging something. For the little guys that can’t get out of the way, it makes sense.
I didn’t. It’s part of the discussion of securing a plane in high winds. Locking the controls forward puts it in anose down configuration. That alone would have kept the plane in the video planted.
It’s basic math. A plane rotates based on a specific speed of wind over the wings. Exceed that and the plane will lift up.
a tail stand on a 727? I would like a picture of that for my collection.
here’s a PDF from Boeing showing a tethered nose gear (page 125).
Here’s an airport offering ground tethering. I’d think it would take more time to tether than use a tail stand but it’s certainly a lot cheaper method. You really don’t need a stand for any plane if it’s loaded/offloaded correctly. But crap happens and it’s easy to understand why companies want the added safety for a $345 million dollar plane.
Back in the days as a little person my Dad and I would stand at the fence at Tulsa and watch the big iron. Most every DC-6 & 7 would have a stick up it’s ass during boarding. I am not sure about the Connies.
C-124’s did this also depending on what was being carried. Pretty easy to get one of them to sit up & beg.
Today, their are many more improvements in everything to make sticking a stick up the ass of airplanes unnecessary but like the airport with big iron tie downs, the exceptions can be found.
or whatever).
