Imagine if they cycled the gear a couple more times and it just fell off in flight. It must of torn up a bunch of gear doors, hydraulic lines and lower fuselage sheet metal.
The body main gear (and wing main gear) bogies angle themselves in a particular alignment before the gear legs are permitted to move towards retraction. Depending on what broke how, the ideal cockpit situation would be raising the handle, having the failure to align be detected, and then having indications that nothing was moving on that one leg; it had chosen to remain fully extended due to the misalignment. While everything else retracted normally. The response being put the gear handle back down and the other 3 mains & nose extend normally. Now burn off / dump fuel & go back and land.
A worse case would be the right body gear tried to retract but was misaligned and grossly failed to fit into the well. That’s pretty safe, there are mechanisms to detect that jam & relieve hydraulic pressure rather than trying to bend shit to make it fit. You’ll have some dents, but “it’ll buff out”. IOW, a predictable managed failure, not an unpredictable unmanaged failure.
A worse yet case is as @Magiver suggests, where the gear almost fits into the well and tears up a bunch of hydraulics, control cables, etc., along the way. And may even get hung up in there. That would be worst case. The body gear, fortunately, have a much “cleaner” well than do the wing gear, where runaway misalignment could tear up a lot more important stuff. The upside of having two separate main gear legs on each side is that losing one is much less of a crisis. As we saw, they rolled to a stop just fine. Lacking the one and only main gear on either side of an e.g. 777 of comparable size / weight would be a much larger deal. As in probably a hull loss, although probably no crew fatalities.
It appears the gear bogie detached from the gear leg post-touchdown. That’s bad, but at least the tilt failure prevented trying to bring that misshapen mess up into the well.
There’s something madcap comedic about watching it bound down the runway. Until you realize it’s 20K lbs. of almost solid steel plus a ton or so of rubber to give it extra unpredictable bounciness, it’s going 170 mph, and it’s the size of a small pickup truck. But much more crashworthy, which means whatever it hits will take all the damage. As @Dr.Strangelove suggests, that could really have tore up somebody’s day. Or a lot of somebodies’.
True, although considering its initial velocity it was pretty much gonna go down the runway. The most likely thing for it to hit was the plane it came off of.
I assume 747 brakes are not failsafe, like those on a train; if hydraulic pressure is lost (as must have happened in this case), the brakes will disengage. The way that bogey was bouncing, the brakes probably wouldn’t have made much difference in where it ended up.
Unless there were runways crossing at odd angles and the wheels tagged another plane waiting on a taxiway.
Here’s a video of a 747 gear swing. if anyone likes that kind of thing.
True, although there was a fire truck pre-deployed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if taxiing aircraft were kept well away from that runway.
I wonder who was shooting the video. They didn’t act like emergency personnel, but who else would be parked next to the runway at a time like that?
At the last second of the Cargolux 747 vid we see a high wing & pitot tube in the left foreground. The vid was evidently taken by the pilot of some flavor of Cessna holding short for departure.
This could go into another thread, but I’m putting it here because it’s about Commercial Aviation.
- Aeroflot asked its employees to stop reporting malfunctions on planes, Proekt reported.
- This means that many flights are departing with significant equipment issues, the outlet added.
- Flying in Russia has become increasingly dangerous as Western sanctions continue to bite the aviation industry.
I never had a great impression of Soviet airliners, back when the Soviet Union existed and they were flying Ilyushins; but now they’re flying Western aircraft – and are unable to maintain them. I thought flying in Russia would be safer when they switched to Boeings and Airbuses. But squawks must be reported on any aircraft if you want to avoid crashes.
A friend of mine went to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He said the flights were an adventure; like the pilots were frustrated fighter jocks. Passenger comfort was not the highest priority; lots of sharp turns and sudden maneuvers.
Thanks! This is also cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y3lpgbTu6k
In US procedure, the pilot in command is the only one authorized to enter maintenance discrepancies. FAs have no ability to do so. But FAs are mandated to report everything to the Captain, who’s mandated to enter them all promptly and not depart until they’re resolved.
So as to the first part, Russians are no different that we are. It’s how much the noticed discrepancies are written versus ignored by Captains that matters. And in that I have no doubt the difference was, and still is, night and day between Russian and Western practice.
I wondered if airliners had camera in the wheel well to check on things. It looks like the brakes were applied as the wheels retracted. Excellent video.
Attention pilots and first officers:
Have you ever found an item during pre-flight that grounded the aircraft. If yes, for how long?
Were passengers affected?
Yes. Feathers and blood on the fan blades of one of the engines. Passengers were affected for a few hours. I can’t remember how long, I just recall we had to fly an engineer in from a maintenance base so he could boroscope the engine.
I’m not a pilot, but as a passenger I was once on a flight that was affected by something they found during the pre-flight walkaround. Or rather something they didn’t find – a protective cover for something was missing (They didn’t tell us what exactly it was the cover for). Since this was a short flight from La Crosse, Wisconsin to Minneapolis, the airline arranged for a bus to take us to MSP. The bus still got us there before the plane did (I think it eventually flew there that afternoon; it was scheduled to be the first flight of the morning).
There are things that need to be removed before flight. For example, pitot tub covers or ejection seat safety pins (the latter not relevant to civilian flight). I’m guessing that the crew was expecting to find something to be removed, that wasn’t there. As a GA pilot, I’d say, ‘No need to remove. It’s already removed.’ I can’t speak for commercial pilots, but I’m guessing finding something not there that should be there – even if the thing is to be removed – is a sign for concern.
For those who haven’t seen these before - funny stuff:
I could see that. If someone forgot to put the pitot tube cover on the night before I could see concern that maybe an insect crawled in there overnight or something, requiring an inspection. But, in the case of my flight, they said they called their maintenance department to ask if they were allowed to fly without it, and they weren’t. So I was picturing something like an access cover that some maintenance person might have removed overnight and forgot to reinstall.
Those were both cool. Thank you both!!
The second one was probably a 737. I’m actually a bit surprised the gear legs moved at all before the wheel brakes were applied; there’s gotta be some serious gyro forces generated by the pivoting gear leg before the wheels stop turning.
None that I know of as a routine matter. I’m betting that 737 (?) gear well vid was some sort of test of a prototype. There was a lot less crap around the periphery of that gear well than is common now on 737s. I don’t immediately recall any RJs or bizjets that have exposed main gear with no outer doors, but there might be some. In which case the vid might be one of those jets instead.
The 727 (and IIRC the 707) had periscopes that the flight engineer could look through in flight to observe the landing gear down-locks. If for whatever reason the normal gear-safe idiot light cockpit indications were not available the idea was to hike back to amidships, peel up the carpeting in the aisle, open 6" square hatches in the floor, then peer through a small telescope-like thingy aimed at where the main gear over-center down-locks would be if the gear was properly down. Which down-locks were painted with red stripes that were supposed to make them easy to identify and easy to verify proper or improper alignment. We looked through the 'scopes once in training and it was obvious they’d only work if someone had cleaned the always-filthy lenses in the ceiling of the wheel wells that very morning. Which of course was never done.
I never had to do it for real, nor do I know anyone who did. I predict anyone who ever tried would have seen nothing but a blurry smear of dried hydraulic fluid, tire & brake dust, and general jet grime. Certainly not any down-lock stripes.
As to the exterior preflight which is what I suspect you mean …
Oh yeah, we find stuff all the time. Tire with a bolt or luggage lock embedded in it. Tire with flat spot from a skid or excess cord showing. Leaking fluids. Debris hug up in an engine. A fresh dent around a cargo or galley door. A fresh dent from a bird, or bird remains, stuck to the leading edge of something. (There are special super-duper stickers attached to dents after they’ve been reported and evaluated so we can tell an old dent from a fresh dent). Burned out or smashed exterior lights. An improperly latched access panel that can’t be properly closed. Or whose door is completely missing. Improperly latched backup fuel measuring sticks. Landing gear legs that are sitting too tall or too flat.
I’ve found each of those over the years many, many times.
In the cockpit we run tests on lots of subsystems first thing in the morning and on some subset of those items before each subsequent flight all day long. We also verify oxygen, oil, and hydraulic quantities. And fuel quantities and distribution between tanks. And we handle lots of knobs and switches, all of which have to be physically OK, not floppy or non-functional. In the course of programming all the computers we end up discovering if any of the keyboard keys are flaky or the machine itself is acting wacko. We also test all 3 (or more) comm radios and the various nav radios as well.
Airliner “preflight” also consists of the FA’s verifying the presence of all their required emergency equipment (dozens of things), proper function of all lav sinks and toilets with no leaks, same for galley plumbing, interior lighting, no missing trim pieces, seat cushions, overhead luggage bins all latch properly, as do all umpteen dozen galley compartments, etc.
All that falls under the general heading of “preflight”.
And it’s all 100% right or else we’re broke until it’s fixed. There is a big book of stuff we are allowed to fly with even if it’s broken. But only after the broken thing is located in the big book, the affected system is troubleshot per another big book of procedures to ensure we all understand the actual malfunction, not just one of the more obvious symptoms, the system reconfigured if necessary to a safe condition according to a third big book, and all that work properly documented. Which documentation starts a countdown timer of just a few days to get it fixed.
Yesterday we took a 10 minute delay to replace 3 passenger emergency oxygen bottles and the inflight medical kit which had been used on the previous flight coping with some passenger illness / crisis inflight. Maintenance was told of the issue about an hour before departure, but it took them an hour & 10 minutes to deal with the problem & document their actions. So we left late.
This morning we had a burned out exterior light. It had been noted the day before and properly documented then to be fixed soon. So we confirmed it was a) still inop, and b) properly documented, then launched with no further issue or delay.
I’ve cancelled flights for maintenance issues and stranded 150-250 people countless times over the years. And much more commonly delayed things for an hour-ish getting stuff fixed. We don’t like it any more than the customers do. But that’s the price of extreme mechanical reliability.
For us nowadays very few things are covered overnight or between flights mid-day. Us finding any kind of cover or “remove before flight” flag is evidence that work was performed, but not properly completed before the aircraft was released by the maintenance department over to the ops department = us.
Which leads to us calling maintenance supervisors out to establish the situation, re-execute the procedural and paper trail that should have removed that, e.g., gear pin, document all their actions, then finally offer us assurance that all is well. Which we’ll go look at ourselves. Cue 45 minute delay. Minimum.
About 10,000 things have to go right, and at the right time, for us to launch one flight flawlessly. The good news is they usually all do.
Do ground effect craft count for this thread?
It sounds like they’re positioning for inter-island transport, say among the Hawaiian islands. Ground effect should make it pretty efficient for short flights (for longer ones, you’d be better off flying at a lower air density).
The Russians had their eraknoplanes. Cool to see the concept (maybe) coming back.