We see these belly landings every couple months – a big passenger airliner or freight jet has to land with wheels up. The plane slides for several hundred feet, maybe a thousand of more, across the concrete runway.
Then what happens? For a plane with an aluminum superstructure, how significant is the damage? Is the plane repairable? What happens if the fuselage is constructed of carbon fiber? Obviously, the engines are shot afterward, but what kind of repair work is needed in these scenarios? Does the plane have to undergo full-body X-ray inspection for structural damage?
I suppose landing on the runway, then tactically sliding across the grassy median is out of the question as a means of mitigating the damage.
I did a quick search of lists of airliner crashes/incidents for a few airliners. Very few had complete landing gear failures but several had one or more sets of gear that didn’t deploy properly. Short answer, it depends. Some airframes were repaired, some were retired. I’m sure it depends on how badly damaged, how old the aircraft, etc.
The Gimli Glider, ( Gimli Glider - Wikipedia) a boeing 767, the pilot - without hydralic power - landed on the old runway repurposed as a drag strip. The landing was so precise (good piloting!) that he split the center guardrails right down the middle… Which took out the front landing gear. There’s a photo of it nose-down in the Wikipedia article.
The aircraft was temporarily repaired at Gimli and flew out two days later to be fully repaired at a maintenance base in Winnipeg. The aircraft was returned to service with Air Canada after the full repair.
I would suggest if an aircraft did a full belly-landing, it would be a write-off simply because most jets have low-hanging engines, and by the time you deal with scraped jet engines, or the engine supports tearing out of the wing spars, it would be unsalvageable. Plus, the center bellypan of a 747 between the wings for example is a fuel tank, so that may pose a problem.
Back in the day our college was friendly with Boeing (a long time before the Current Unpleasantness). I did a Boeing tour with some students. Got a lot of stories.
One they told me was about a jet that belly landed hard at an airport in India. The whole bottom was smashed. Boeing sent out a bunch of people and a lot of parts and X months later the plane flew home for further work.
Estimating that this would have been in the late 80s.
I’m a white knuckle flier and I am going to Italy this fall (from the US. I’m terrified and everywhere I turn I see stories about plane crashes. Damnit.
Remember that there are something like 100,000 flights worldwide every day and the number of actual crashes and other incidents is minimal. In other words, probably nothing bad will happen.
I know, thanks. Cognitively I understand that flying relatively safe, I just don’t want to think about it… but last few weeks YouTube keep suggesting plane crash videos. Sheesh!
I didn’t realize belly landings were that common. My father was on a jet whose landing gear wouldn’t deploy. So they flew around in circles to burn off the fuel, while briefing the passengers on the position to assume during the landing. (It’s the one you don’t pay attention to in the little safety foldout.) And in the meantime, the news reporters got wind of it, so hundreds of cameras were ready to film the crash, and both my mother and my sister heard on the radio that the plane my father was in was going to make a crash landing, and were anxiously following the story.
So i thought they must be pretty rare.
After they’d circled for 20 or 30 minutes, my father heard a loud “thunk”, and the pilot came on the speaker to tell them that the landing gear had deployed after all, and they were going to descend for a normal landing. Which is what happened.
On a modern high bypass fanjet, the majority of what appears to be engine is just empty space. It is where the high bypass lives. The fan at the front, and some support mechanicals, may take a beating, but the rest of the engine is likely pretty much unscathed. Pakistan International flight 8303 shows just how much of a beating can be taken and still fly, at least for a short while.
The engines account for a very significant fraction of the value of an aircraft. So you will be hoping to recover them.
I am reminded of British Airways flight 38 which had about as hard a landing as you might hope to walk away from. The aircraft was written off. I remember some of the commentary being that past a certain point, nobody wanted find that they were flying on that same aircraft, no matter how carefully it might have been repaired. So the aircraft was cannibalised for a very significant fraction of its worth.
I’ve known about the Gimli Glider for quite some time. That wiki is a very good article and I would recommend it to anyone, especially @Lucas_Jackson . That was some seriously good piloting. Right up there with ‘Sully’ Sullenburger.
There was actually some good flying just before the crash, and the crash led to a huge improvement in training via the Crew Resource Management program.
IIRC, something similar happened in Florida, but in that case both pilot and copilot were too absorbed in diagnosing the problem and failed to notice they were getting too close to the ground. They crashed into the Everglades(?) without running out of fuel.
