They’ll have a commercial about it out by summer.
Most of these planes are built so the tire doesn’t fall off at all.
Admit it you were out hooning and hit the airplane. We can see the tire marks.
Just because you walked away from a landing doesn’t mean you didn’t prang the crap out of the main’s.
@Elendil_s_Heir: I now see that my two posts about the engine fire were comprehensively ninja’ed by @WildaBeast. I think I’d begun writing before they snuck in above me. I wasn’t trying to beat a dead horse, and especially not your dead horse. Though I sure did a thorough job of it. 
There’s no normal procedure to fiddle with the 737 yaw damper; you turn it on real early in preflight and it trips off when the IRS system is switched off after shutdown.
There’s also no way I can see for the YD to lock up the pedals. The 737 Classic rudder system had those weird opposite direction hard-overs back in the 1980s(?), which led to a redesign of the rudder actuators, and the addition of a mechanism to detect confusion in the actuator(s) and disable normal hydraulic power if that occurs. Which mechanism would (should?) leave you with sufficient manual & alternate rudder and no locked up linkages.
The taxi steering tiller works at any speed, but is geared for sharp turns at low speed. It would take a very ginger hand to avoid overcontrolling the nosewheel at e.g. 120kts. It’s effectively independent of the rudder control system, which also has weak and range-limited inputs to the nosegear for steering during takeoff and landing. Assuming no malfunctions, you can mash full rudder and get a gentle nosegear turn that way, then turn the tiller opposite and the nosegear responds to the much larger tiller input the other way, while the rudder continues to follow the pedal input.
That NBC article is surprisingly long on good details. Although the 737 is fail-passive autoland capable, most carriers don’t buy that option. Instead opting for very low-vis approaches to be hand flown by the Captain looking through the HUD. By doing so, the carrier gets the same weather minimums as autoland but with a much smaller maintenance / calibration burden.
Reading between the lines a bit, it appears this particular 737 has the autoland package installed and for whatever confused reason the automated roll-out guidance system activated and was trying to keep the airplane centered on the runway when it should not have been. Or perhaps worse yet, it partly activated with the effect of neither tracking the localizer centerline down the runway, nor allowing the pilots to make inputs. So nobody was steering there for a few seconds.
As the article points out, although this was a MAX, the NG system is the same. Or at least is the same as far as they tell the pilots.
Oooh…snarky MCAS reference. Nice.
Not really. Just that there is a lot of details of gizmos below decks that change for reasons of durability or whatever. The part number for this particular gizmo may differ between NG and MAX even though they’re supposed to be functionally identical at the pilot level.
As to MCAS, that system is on every 767 ever built. And is not mentioned anywhere in any 767 pilot manual I’m aware of back pre-MAX debacle, or now post-MAX debacle. it’s not in Boeing’s version of the 767 manual, nor that of the two airlines I’ve flown them for.
At least the front didn’t fall off.
Think of the weight savings though. Dropping the tires after takeoff is smart. You just need a little more power to taxi later.
As for autoland, that reminded me of the probably apocryphal story about the pilot who wrote in the log, “Autoland very rough in this aircraft”, and maintenance signed it off with, “Autoland not installed in this aircraft”. That might have been a story in “If You Read Me, Rock the Tower.”
That and some other good ones here: Aircraft Mechanic Humor | Mechanics Hub
My bolding.
I presume you’ve done this. What’s that like and what’s the flying reference in the flare? Are you following the flight director?
Fans of Clarke and Dawe (the two guys in the video) might want to find The Games, a mockumentary they did in the late-'90s about the organizing of the Sydney Olympics. It’s still one of the funniest TV series I’ve ever seen.
United having a bad week.
And Boeing can’t catch a break. 737 MAX 8.
A question for our resident pilots, based on an incident that happened to me yesterday:
I boarded a Delta flight at 5:50 am for a 6:30 am takeoff from Lambert in St. Louis. Still dark. Presume the plane had been parked at the gate since the previous night. The sun rose as we were boarding. And when it got light, one of the ground crew noticed bird debris on one of the wings or engines. Apparently the plane had hit a bird (a BIG bird they told us) on its way in from wherever it came from.
The mechanics came and looked at it. They made us deplane, and then after several hours of head-scratching, decided the plane was not able to be flown. They brought in another aircraft from Cinncinati. The flight was delayed nine hours (is that a record???). We passengers had time to get all the way through anger, depression, bargaining, denial and acceptance. At least twice.
But my question is this. The plane flew IN with the bird debris on it. Presumably, unlike the Sully incident, the crew didn’t even notice because nobody informed the airline that one of their planes had a bird strike. Is there a reason it couldn’t have flown back out? If we had taken off before the sun rose, apparently nobody would have noticed it. How dangerous was it, exactly? And what kind of maintenance would they need to do to make the plane flyable again?
Known bird strike evidence (feathers and body parts on the airplane) has to be dealt with by maintenance under most conditions. Even if it’s in an area that doesn’t appear critical, it can be an issue. Quick story:
When I flew for a regional airline I got stuck one week flying with the chief pilot of our base. The problem wasn’t his being the chief pilot, the problem was he was a very unpleasant person and nobody wanted to fly with him (in my experience, there’s one in every pilot group). So I put up with him disliking everything I did for a few days and being “re-instructed” on a few things he was actually wrong about. He got very upset at one point when I pulled a flow diagram out of our manual showing him I really was doing a certain procedure correctly, despite his insistence to the contrary.
So then we took off one day out of some not-great weather, heading for our base city where the weather was much better. We also happened to have our FAA principal operations inspector onboard as a passenger. After takeoff the flight attendant calls up and reports a bird strike - feathers and stuff on one of the wings. We hadn’t felt anything and our instruments showed no issues.
But Mr. Chief Pilot goes white and starts fretting. Does the POI know about this??? Should we turn back and land??? He turns to me and asks very earnestly what I think we should do. And I didn’t verbalize it, but I thought, “Oh, now you’re interested in my opinion. Now that you’re in trouble.” It was the only time in my career I felt no desire to help my flying partner.
But neither did I think it was a good idea to do an air return into bad weather when nothing appeared to be amiss. So I suggested we continue, which we did. He later grounded the airplane pending a maintenance inspection.
He was the only professional pilot who I ever felt wasn’t playing on the same team as me. But he certainly took the bird strike seriously.
It surprises me a bit that this was only noticed in the sunlight. I would hope there was enough artificial light on the ramp that the ground crew could see anything that was critical to the plane’s safety.
I wonder if the inspection was just a routine part of the pre-flight process, and it was just a coincidence that it happened at sunrise.
That’s what the captain told us when he apprised us of the situation. He specifically said that when the sun came up they noticed the debris. Perhaps he was being colloquial.
Lots in the sim, every couple weeks in good weather for practice, and a handful of times every winter for real. Our lowest landing mins were 600/400/300 feet or 175/125/75 meters with a DH of 50ft. Sporty the first few times you do it for real.
The 737 has the typical dual autopilot / flight director system, one set for each side. The HUD has a third flight director computer unrelated to the other two.
The set-up is the HUD is configured for low-vis guided landing and the normal AP/FD is set up for a normal ILS approach. The Captain hand-flies with only autothrottle engaged from the outer marker inbound using the HUD’s flight director guidance while the FO is glued to their own PFD with it’s FD guidance. Plus they keep an eye on a small annunciator panel adjacent to their PFD that displays the HUD’s equivalent of the FMA + HUD-specific failure flags. Flags on either system are cause for go-around.
Simplifying mightily … the HUD flight director is a small circle you chase with the circle+wings that comprise the flight path marker. If they’re nested nicely, you’re where the FD wants you to be, whether on-course/path or correcting appropriately towards it. At 300RA a runway perspective outline appears and begins to grow as you approach the runway. That is a big clue it’s time to get real serious about seeing the touchdown zone lights real soon. It disappears at 60RA, an instant before you need to see the real runway or go around.
The actual flare guidance is yet another symbol, a + sign. At 100RA it appears aways below the FPM & FD circle and immediately begins marching upwards to join them at flare initiation altitude. As the plus sign merges into the flight director circle and they lock together, which happens around 40RA assuming typical airspeed & descent rates you need to begin pulling to follow them both upwards into the flare.
About then the autothrottles are dragging the power back, as modulated by the Captain. You never want to touch down in a 737 with any power above idle, and if you’re slow or late on the flare you’ll arrive vigorously while the autothrottles are still gently dragging the power back. That way lies PIOs and tailstrikes.
Because of the 737s high approach speed, generally 150-160KIAS, our normal approach VVI is 850-900 fpm. At that descent rate, it’s 6-2/3 seconds from 100RA to impact. Under worst case visibility, you may not see the runway and lights until about 4 seconds before impact. And then need to decide if a) that is a runway, not the approach lights short of the runway or a freeway, and b) are we well-aligned enough to land on it?
Quite a lot needs to happen in that very short interval.
Once the wheels are on the ground the FD guidance shifts to maintaining runway centerline via the localizer. Some braking action and runway stopping distance predictions appear to help you have too much crap to look at manage your deceleration so you don’t slide off the far end you won’t see until a couple seconds before it happens.
Like I said, sporty the first few times, especially when the snow is blowing sideways and the vis keeps shifting.
Between what we can see in the pics and the confusing wording in the article, it’s difficult to tell whether they departed the side of a runway or a taxiway. As well, based on the signage we see and the fact they departed the left side of the surface I’m really struggling to reconcile that with the KIAH FAA airfield diagram: 05461BASE (faa.gov).
It will be very interesting to see if there’s any correlation between this failure to maintain directional control and the stuck rudder pedals event the other day in Newark.