*A Southwest Airlines flight has landed safely at Orlando International Airport after it was diverted to the area Thursday afternoon with a landing gear issue.
The flight was traveling from Fort Lauderdale to Denver when it was diverted to Orlando, according to Southwest.
Southwest officials said the plane blew a tire when it was taking off in Fort Lauderdale.
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anyway here’s my general question: if the problem is with the landing gear, why not just continue flying to your original destination and do the landing there?
Perhaps they did not retract the landing gear, and thought that the tire might come completely off rather than simply flat if they retracted it then dropped it in Denver? Also, might a blown tire get stuck in the wheel well? (I am not sure if that last one is possible)
Also, if I were a pilot with a blown tire and thus needed my landing to be watched carefully, I’d want to land at the first airport that was prepared to do so, not try to arrange a special landing with Denver several hours ahead of time.
You never know if something else got damaged or not, so the safe thing to do is to return to the airport. It may seem kinda silly to just fly around in circles burning off or dumping fuel, but that way they stay near the airport if they have a problem like a loss of hydraulics from damaged lines or whatever. You don’t want to be out in the middle of nowhere when your ability to control the plane starts to deteriorate. Better to be close to an airport.
They also will often keep the gear down to prevent possible damage to other things. Something might be broken which will end up jammed if they retract the gear, or if the tire catches fire, you don’t want to bring a burning tire up inside the plane. With the gear down the plane’s speed is limited, and you don’t want to be flying low and slow because if there is a problem, you might not have enough altitude to get to the nearest airport.
My son blew a tire on my old pickup and it dented the entire rear quarter panel behind the tire, and that’s just a pickup truck tire. A big plane tire can do a lot more damage when it comes apart.
Poking around on google, I found an example of what a blown tire can do. Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 crashed when a tire blew (due to poor maintenance and under-inflated tires). The landing gear was retracted, and the burning tire took out hydraulic lines and electrical systems.
Yes - landing (over-the-ground) speed increases with altitude.
To be sure, it also increases with weight, and the plane would have had plenty of fuel still aboard, having flown just from Ft Lauderdale to Orlando. (It may, of course, have dumped some - though I haven’t been able to find that mentioned in any article.)
This. Your son’s truck tire was probably filled to 30, maybe 35 psi, and it probably was doing less than 75MPH when it came apart. Aircraft tires are filled to 200 psi and may be doing as much as 150 MPH when they pop. That’s a lot more energy.
Here’s a Camaro doing an exhibition burnout with the front wheels chocked. The problem is that the left rear wheel isn’t spinning…which means the diff is sending all of the RPM to the right rear wheel. He gets up to high RPM in third gear, so that tire’s doing 150+ MPH when it finally blows (kaboom at 1:10). Fast forward to 1:47, and observe the catastrophic damage to that quadrant of the car: there’s tread, glass, and metal everywhere. So imagine the chaos if the tire has 6 times the air pressure. If you retract your landing gear with this kind of mess, you risk jamming/bending linkages worse than they already are, and you risk shearing hydraulic lines. Safest course of action is to keep the gear down and locked, get the people on the ground to do a visual inspection while you make a couple of low/slow passes, and then try to get the plane on the ground safely in the near future instead of flying for several more hours.
According to the Southwest schedule, flight 736 departs Fort Lauderdale at 10:00 a.m. and makes an intermediate stop in Dallas before continuing to Denver. Since it didn’t land in Orlando until 12:45 I’m guessing they flew around for awhile burning fuel.
And if I were Southwest, I’d prefer not having my planes make emergency landings at Love Field. Close a runway there for even 15 minutes and you’ve disrupted half the airline’s schedule.
What’s up with SWA? mechanics mired down in contract talks, flight attendants sending the CEO a letter about safety concerns - blown tires, blown engines, blown windows. I’m not anymore feeling the love for WN, free checked bags or not
You may not want to retract the landing gear into the plane after a blown tire. So then you’d have to fly the whole flight with the gear down – that would cost a whole lot in decreased fuel mileage. And cost is very important to airlines.
You want the repairs to be done somewhere where you have the spare parts (rather than needing to buy them from someone else or ship them in) and where you have mechanics available (rather than hiring some other airline’s mechanics or flying them in). So it might be much cheaper to do repairs at Orlando rather than Denver. And airlines care about doing things cheaply.
Yes, the cost of a few hundred lawsuits. I’d say that fuel and spare parts costs on a single Southwest flight with a blown tire are not considered in the decision.
The airline(s) would probably opt for whatever is cheapest. Passenger/crew safety–they don’t give a rat’s ass unless it’s going to cost them something. If they think they can crash the plane killing everyone aboard and could dole out less for all the lawsuits and fines, than paying for repairs, they’d do it.
Don’t believe all the bullshit businesses spout about caring about their “mission statement”,employees, products, or the effect on the environment; the only thing they love is the bottom line.
Unfortunately, the airlines still have not developed 100% remote control for their planes. The ultimate control of the plane is still in the hands of the pilot. Most pilots do not want to die in service of their airline. Yes, there were a few pilots who wanted to die, but their motives were not to increase the profit of the airline.