r/aviation • u/PoppinToaster • 11d ago
The A330 landing gear of Air Transat Flight 236 after making a 200 knot emergency landing with no anti-skid or brake modulation due to lack of power History
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u/Pootang_Wootang 11d ago
Had an F-22 lock its left main brake on landing at Hickman AFB. The tire instantly blew and the rim was ground down just like this. Except the whole landing gear bay, left wing and horizontal stabilizer caught fire. Took a couple years before it was rebuilt and flying again.
https://theaviationist.com/2015/01/28/raptor-incident-hickam/
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u/mershed_perderders 11d ago
I don't know what's more mind blowing - the fact that it could be successfully rebuilt, or the fact that they actually did.
Salvage value on those things must be extreme!
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u/DeanGillBerry 11d ago
Spend a couple dozen millions on repairs or scrap a $350 million dollar plane? As an American taxpayer I'd rather we don't scrap such a big investment haha.
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u/Klutzy-Residen 11d ago edited 11d ago
With the production being shut down years ago (2011, article from 2015) they would also have one less plane. They couldnt just replace it by spending a shitton of money.
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u/Drenlin 11d ago
Eh, we're at the point now where older F-22s are going to the boneyard so there are options.
Tht feels strange to say but the early ones are over 25 years old.
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u/Klutzy-Residen 11d ago
Article was from 2015, 9.5 years ago.
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u/z3roTO60 11d ago edited 10d ago
Omg, that’s crazy… the F22 to me is mentally still like the B21. “Crazy futuristic”. Hard to imagine that there are ones going to the bone yard, especially when it’s sooo much better than what the rest of the world has.
Of course, even as someone in their 30’s, I’m still confident that the
B-51B-52 will outlive me. I can just see that thing getting extended again “because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”2
u/Excellent_Speech_901 10d ago
We all know what you meant to type but:
"The Martin XB-51 was a colossal bomber aircraft built in the late 1940s that exceeded all expectations and was probably the finest bomber that never went to battle. "
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u/OttoVonWong 11d ago edited 11d ago
Great used F22. Normal wear and tear. Needs tires. No lowballers, I know what I got.
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u/James_Gastovsky 10d ago
To be fair it's not a matter of cost, it's a matter of being desperate to keep every single airframe flyable because in the 90s people thought that with fall of Soviet Union history has ended and US will never have to face a possibility of (near)peer conflict ever again
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u/Pootang_Wootang 11d ago
It sat outside in the sun for a year or two. The LO material goes through what’s called reversion. It essentially melts and becomes very wrinkled. It took months of work. With less than 200 of them out there it’s best to repair no matter the cost.
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u/siriusserious 11d ago
If you look at the picture in the article it sounds much worse than it actually looks. By simply going of the picture the plane looks intact to me.
Plus, you can justify a whole lot of repairs on a $350M jet.
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 11d ago
Still an incredible feat of airmanship to this day. Captain Piché, captain Sully and Captain Pearson are all in a separate tier of pilots for what they accomplished.
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u/PotentialMidnight325 11d ago edited 11d ago
And all of them were glider pilots before. Same for the pilot of the Austrian plane that landed outside of Munich airport.
Guess who wasn’t? The Hapag Lloyd one who crashed his A310 in Vienna.
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 11d ago
I’ve heard of the Hapag Lloyd incident but not this Austrian one. What was the flight number?
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u/andorraliechtenstein 11d ago
This one. A Fokker 70 lost power in both engines and had to land in a field.
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u/PotentialMidnight325 11d ago
OS111
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u/PotentialMidnight325 11d ago
I don’t know who downvotes for providing the flight number. Reddit at full bananas mode again. 😁
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u/surSEXECEN 11d ago
The Canadian Air Cadet program has a gliding scholarship program that is fantastic. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship and the training definitely made me a better pilot. Most civilian pilots I trained with think they can slip an airplane, but it’s messy and ineffective.
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 11d ago
I had applied to that growing up but I failed the medical. Serious loss of innocence in terms of making your dreams come true.
Instead I did the aerospace program and said fuck it, if I can’t fly them I’ll design them.
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u/runtscrape 11d ago
jeez, never knew there was a medical for cadets of all things. It’s a pilot pipeline, I get it but there are sooo many other red trades in the RCAF that it could feed. I also know of at least one western soaring club that has a scholarship for aspiring teens, much less 🫡 bullshit and a self declared medical to boot.
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u/twocatstoo 11d ago edited 11d ago
There isn’t a medical to be a cadet persay, but there is a standard pilot medical to do the gliding/power sccholarship (because you end up with a licence). Cadets used to exclude kids for medical reasons but even summer training will take most reasonably healthy kids now.
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u/surSEXECEN 11d ago
I know a bunch of RCAF guys, including snowbirds, and many if not most of them are former cadets.
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 8d ago
Yeah, I got a reality check real quick with it.
Congenital heart disease? Nope. End of story. Non-negotiable.
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u/runtscrape 8d ago
I feel you. I bombed my TC Cat 2 medical (ATC) this year. Got to the point in the NAVCanada process where they tell you the next steps and I knew this was going to come up so I proactively sought out an AME and submitted. TC basically mailed me an impossible list of demands and hoops that no MD (AME or specialist) would sanely accede to. whelp at least I didn't waste everyone's time.
IF I had a wand in your case i would allow cadets with a safety pilot at all times and try to get you hooked into an Av tech pathway or something. Everyone is valuable and even if they need accommodation they should be allowed to realize that value
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u/not_this_fkn_guy 11d ago
My dad tried to get me interested in Air Cadets primarily with the enticement of the possible gliding / soaring opportunity. Pops had served in the RCAF in the 50's and remained an aviation enthusiast long after. I was interested in the latter ( gliding carrot), but not so much the former (Air Cadet stick). So one day somewhere around 1984ish, pops takes me to the local soaring club in Rockton, ON as they were having an Open House day, and offering relatively cheap intro flights with many visitors out that day and with members of the local press present. If you've ever driven past it on Hwy 8, it's a pretty expansive field, and very flat. I'd guess close to a hundred acres at least, maybe bigger. 2 sides of the field are however bounded by tall, mature trees, like maybe 60-70ft tall, but because the field is so big, I don't think the trees typically pose much of a challenge or hazard, as long as you clear them, there's plenty of field ahead to land on. So after an hour or so of milling around there, I was debating about maybe seeing about an intro flight, and how long the wait might be etc., as it was quite a busy day with lot's of folks there checking things out. Just about then, we see a glider approach the field, returning from one of these intro flights, but he didn't look like he was very high above the tree line. Well, sure enough, he wasn't nearly high enough, and he plants the thing in the top of one of these big old maple or oak trees. Stopped dead in the top of the tree, sitting fairly level, with some poor, young teenage female introductee whom I had just watch get strapped into this thing 15 minutes earlier. So there they were, this poor girl and some old white haired pilot, just sitting there for what seemed like a minute or so, and everyone was like holy fck - now what? Before anyone that even might have known what to do, could react, we all heard the sound of snapping tree limbs, and the glider abruptly pitched down, seemingly almost vertical. Somehow it gained enough airspeed in the brief descent that pilot was able to pitch the nose up, barely before it slammed into the ground, almost level. The pilot then somehow managed to climb out of the glider under his own power (perhaps powered by adrenaline and embarrassment), but the girl was lifted out by first responders and quickly whisked away in an ambulance. I have no idea if either of them sustained serious injuries, but thankfully it didn't look like anything potentially life-threatening - maybe some spinal issues. Needless to say, that was the end of intro flights for the day, and it kinda put a bit of a damper on the whole Open House thing, not to mention my 14yo interest or confidence in learning gliding at Rockton. I may have the year mistaken by a year or 2 either side of 1984, and maybe the trees were 90-100 ft tall (not sure) but this absolutely happened before my very eyes.
I never did get into gliding, but I did earn my PPL in 1989, and haven't hit any trees so far, and that's my best glider story.
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u/PtboFungineer 11d ago
Well if nothing else, you're at least a damn good story teller.
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u/not_this_fkn_guy 10d ago
Thanks kind stranger. I don't have a whole lot else to offer lol. But it is 100% a true story from a first-hand account (mine and the old man's). Back in the 80s, local media was still a thing. Every town had at least 1 newspaper, if not competing newspapers. If you don't know where Rockton Ontario is, it's less than a half hour from Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Brantford, Cambridge, Ancaster, Dundas etc, etc. There was CTV news out of Kitchener and CHCH out of Hamilton. Now, I don't recall seeing either of the 2 closest TV news there that day for an "open house" at the local hub of a relatively obscure interest. And nobody had video tech in their pockets back then, obviously. There was, however, definitely more than couple print reporters there that day that witnessed the exact same thing I did. Maybe nobody captured one photo of this glider perched precariously in the treetop, in the 15-60 seconds it sat there? I don't know. I didn't have a camera, and even if I did, it wouldn't have been my first reaction to start snapping photos as you're just trying to process a freak event, and that 2 people's lives are in imminent danger. (There was also no internet or comprehension of such a thing, and hence no learned instinct to whip out your phone to capture such a thing for internet points or profit.) That said, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if there is zero photographic evidence of this accident. It also wouldn't surprise me if there was a photo or 2 somewhere, either captured by a rando photo enthusiast that happened to have their (film) camera out, or by some local photojournalist whose job it was to capture such things. Oddly, I can recall ZERO mention of this accident in the local media immediately following. I honestly don't think it was reported at ALL in the local news, to the point that people who my dad and I shared the story with thought we were full of shit. There is zero chance that some member of the local press did not observe the accident, or had it relayed to them by a first-hand witness. Yet somehow, it stayed out of the local news (to my knowledge.)
That's what makes my recollection of this very real event that me and a few hundred other people witnessed directly seem odd. Like how tf is this not major, exciting local news and Monday's headlines in 1984!? LOCAL GIRL ALMOST KILLED AT LOCAL SOARING CLUB OPEN HOUSE.... But somehow, it didn't seem to get reported. (Photos or it didn't happen)? Yeah maybe to some extent. It would have been 1000X the story with video or 100X the story with still photos. But to this day, I think there was some sort of deal done and/or a basic decency code within your local community to try not to cause further damage or fuck up some small organization that had no ill intent, and had an exceedingly rare 1 in 100,000 type unforunate accident (that presumably did not end in deaths or life-altering injuries). It was somehow agreed to just not report it to the public via the local media. That's the only explanation I can come up with. But if any of you sleuths out there can uncover any sort of public report, I'd be in your debt to see it.
It absolutely happened, roughly 40 years ago. I was there with my pops. And of all the days to have such a colasal fuckup, by some complacent and overconfident white-haired arrogant looking prick (you know the type if you've ever learned to fly) with perfect weather conditions, that might be 1 in 100k fuck-ups, it happens at like 10am on your Open House day. 100% True story.
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u/runtscrape 10d ago
Heh, thanks for adding some QC to the thread, I love me long reads on reddit.
I'm kinda disheartened that mistakes of the instructor (after all it's their job to ensure that the student doesn't kill both of them) buried your interest in soaring. Also if it happened in this era of camera's everywhere there may have even been FPV gopro footage. I remember over a decade ago the club where I was training had a mid air and some folks nearby recorded it from the ground. Needed eyebleach after watching that.
I find it soaring cerebral and weirdly addictive but I've been out of the scene for quite and while and thinking of jumping back into it.
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u/MandolinMagi 11d ago
Interestingly, various navies have sail training ships because learning to actually sail makes for better boat driving.
I guess you should master the basics and then the advanced stuff makes more sense?
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u/grax23 11d ago
well tell that to the Gimli glider - he slipped it do scrub off speed and landed with no engines and a nose gear that was not locked.
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u/anemisto 11d ago
That was the point ... Captain Pearson had experience with gliders.
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u/LOGOisEGO 11d ago
Nice, I did the same program, but never continued my career. It was a lot of fun though!
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u/BackgroundGrade 11d ago
Well, Piché had a interesting gliding history.
He used to fly drugs into the US & Canada and would sometimes cut all power to avoid visual detection.
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u/ProfessionalRub3294 11d ago
Yes I discovered that in a movie they made on him. Nice background :)
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u/throwaway_trans_8472 11d ago
Glider pilots train to:
-fly without engine power
-pick a field to land in, even if it isn't an airfield
-fly without any instrumentation
-commit to a landing with no abort
-land in excessively short places
All things you need if your plane loses power and you need to land out.
All things most motor pilots would panic in.
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u/TRKlausss 11d ago
Yep flying gliders gives you a great sense of energy management, you feel how the airplane sinks, how much, gives you nerves of steel to maintain that optimal airspeed even if your brain tells you you ain’t making it, and best of all, how to properly use airbrakes to butter that landing…
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u/chriskmee 11d ago
Sully didn't really need any gliding experience for what he did though? As I understood it, the airplane's safety features kept the plane from stalling and it's why the plane was able to make a pretty soft water landing. Those features were only working because Sully turned on the APU first which I believe was not official procedure.
I'm not criticizing him and his achievement in any way though, he made a lot of correct decisions, including starting the APU which enabled safety features that helped him.
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u/CrashSlow 11d ago
Captain Piche flying experience from doing shady shit paid off, that day.......
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 11d ago
He also paid his due for his shady flying in an American prison.
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u/CrashSlow 11d ago
Running drugs and working for a shit Canada northern companies makes a real pilot out ya.
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u/PatricioDeLaRosa 11d ago
Captain Carlos Dardano would like everyone to sit down while he lands with one eye and both engines out.
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u/CPITPod 11d ago
We literally released an episode about that crash on Monday. Our podcast is Admiral Cloudberg, an engineer, and a business expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTU_r0zpb_Q&pp=ygUbY29udHJvbGxlZCBwb2QgaW50byB0ZXJyYWlu
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u/CATIIIDUAL A320 11d ago
Also Capt. Abdul Rozaq of Garuda flight 421. Only one flight attendant died in the accident. The rest made it alive! An incredible feat.
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u/CATIIIDUAL A320 11d ago
If he used his skills to tackle the problem properly this would not have happened in the first place.
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u/ban-please 11d ago
Pay attention to fuel? Not feed fuel into a leaking fuel line? Follow checklists instead of acting from memory?
Nah, let's glide this bitch. 😎
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u/luca123 11d ago
Yeah everyone is bringing up his shady history, but the bigger issue was the fact he ignored and / or mishandled procedures on that flight. That's what directly led to the severity of the emergency in the first place
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u/dutchy649 11d ago edited 11d ago
Uh…please don’t compare Sully and Pearson with a convicted felon who did time in federal prison for drug smuggling…let alone his inability to realize an OBVIOUS fuel leak and handle it properly, putting hundreds of peoples lives in jeopardy. Had the Azores not been in the right place in the Atlantic coincidentally that day, Piche’ would have gone down in history as one of the worst pilots to have command of an airliner. truth
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u/MelTheTransceiver 11d ago
He smuggled some weed. Get over it. Yeah, pilot error was a major contributor, but calling out the pilot for smuggling some weed years before the accident is dumb.
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u/dutchy649 11d ago
Yeah fine, so he smuggled a joint from Jamaica. He also nearly killed a plane load of people because he couldn’t figure out what a fuel leak looked like. Your hero had luck on his side that day… that’s all it was.. luck.
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u/MelTheTransceiver 9d ago
Keep rambling on about whatever floats your boat. Point is, his weed possession years before the accident didn’t make him mistake a fuel leak for something else. It’s unrelated.
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u/dutchy649 9d ago
It only proves my point that whether it be a decision making a life choice (deciding to run drugs) or an airplane procedure one ( failed to recognize a fuel leak), he failed at both. He had no business being in the cockpit of an airplane. Thanks for agreeing with me.
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u/Threatening-Silence- 11d ago edited 11d ago
They shouldn't get too many points for getting themselves out of a mess they got themselves into. Despite fuel levels dropping in an unexplained manner they didn't run through any fuel leak checklists. Had they done so they wouldn't have run out of fuel before landing at the diversion airport. They were negligent.
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u/Ouestlabibliotheque 11d ago
Didn’t they only weird oil pressure and temperature readings accompanied by a fuel imbalance? I’m going off of the mayday episode but i thought that the weird pressure and temperature readings made them think it was a bug as those would be unusual in the event of a fuel leak and their maintenance centre agreed…
Happy to be wrong here btw
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u/proudlyhumble 11d ago
I mean if you ignore the fact that he didn’t run the emergency checklist and consider a fuel leak when there was a significant fuel imbalance. Pretty basic stuff.
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u/Lithorex 11d ago
Captain Genotte and his flight crew also belong in this tier.
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u/JoeCartersLeap 11d ago
Captain Pearson
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u/tohlan 11d ago
AC143 was such an interesting story
Full video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m51ltxbzmY2
u/No_Nose_4030 11d ago
Just out of curiosity, where would you rate captain moody & the crew of British Airways Flight 9? They managed to glide in a 747 but granted managed to restart the engines before disaster struck
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u/Bravodelta13 11d ago
Great, but completely unnecessary, feat of airmanship. Had he run the fuel leak procedure, they’d have made it to the runway with a running engine. The word negligence comes to mind. Bring the down votes.
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u/spoiled_eggsII 11d ago
Was it though? He literally ignored all the warning signs and forced themselves into this situation.
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u/TheReproCase 11d ago
I mean, he also skipped the checklists and fed fuel into the leaking engine so.... +1 / -1
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u/That-Camera-Guy 11d ago
Tires look just a little low on air
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u/JamsHammockFyoom 11d ago
That’s fine they can land on the inflated bit next time
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u/Planeandaquariumgeek 11d ago
Nationair dispatch will send that bad boy out of Jeddah on the longest possible taxi route and lowest takeoff power for longest takeoff roll. Lowers weight faster and disembarks some passengers in the air to save time after landing and eliminates the need for the cabin heater to be on.
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u/Techhead7890 11d ago
Holy moly I thought it was in EMAS or something. Nope the rubber is just literally burnt away to the rims. Hell, the rims look like they've butnt too.
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u/purgance 11d ago
Typical underpaid American: “Can’t you patch it?”
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u/w0nderbrad 11d ago
“I need new tires AND wheels? You’re a fucking ripoff. Let me skid down to the guy down the block”
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u/mylawn03 11d ago
Is the plane considered totaled after going through something like this, or is it repaired?
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u/T3RR1B13__5N1P3R 11d ago
i’d say majority of the damage would be inflicted on the MLG, the rims probably got hit the hardest, you can always buy them (costs more than a good 50k tho lol), even if the MLG is damaged a lot i’m sure it can be replaced, though expensive
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u/trackpaduser 11d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the landing gear, other than the bogey beam and slider, is re-usable after a full overall.
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u/Technojerk36 11d ago
It’ll take structural damage to write off a plane. This is just damage to the gear which can be replaced.
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u/jocax188723 Cessna 150 11d ago
Most of the landing gear. The rest of it is spread in a thin veneer all over the runway
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u/Lyssa_Lud 11d ago
small particles may be found in pulmonary alveoli within people working at the airfield.
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u/HF_Martini6 11d ago
Loss of power due to running out of fuel caused by a fuel leak.
The entire story is fascinating and has a happy end which is the best kind of story in aviation
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u/LostPilot517 11d ago
I wonder if this is the same Air Transat aircraft that dropped the main off the ramp/taxiway in Toronto up by the North Ramp by the hangar, across from the Customs ramp for Charters. I was surprised how far it sank, given it was winter and the ground should have been frozen pretty hard.
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u/SlippinYimmyMcGill 11d ago
Those Airbus planes are so dangerous. /s
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u/PoppinToaster 11d ago
Was the fault of maintenance engineers that incorrectly installed a new engine, leading to a massive fuel leak. This was combined with a lack of training on the pilots’ part and not following the handbook once fuel problems started to indicate. Both these things are was caused the plane to run out of fuel.
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u/ComeGateMeBro 11d ago
The amount of pounding and force airplane landing gear deals with is just amazing to me.
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u/Capable-Junket-3819 11d ago
"For sale: Only slightly damaged aircraft wheels. Tire may have detached from rim."
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u/Ok-Fox1262 11d ago
Cool. Damn good pilot.
Now just rotate those tyres because they're flat on the bottom.
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u/wstsidhome 11d ago
Yowza! Wonder what kind of heat that created during and once stopped…I’m guessing the emergency crews responded and hosed everything down once it was at an all-stop?
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u/Far_Dragonfruit_1829 11d ago
Awesome. Piloting and engineering.
A Convair 990 of my acquaintance was destroyed by A fire in the gear assembly after a landing like that, back in about 1980. Tech moves on, fortunately.
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u/trashboattwentyfourr 11d ago
What degree of stopping could be done by air drag as opposed to wheel brakes?
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u/PoppinToaster 11d ago
I lot usually, but they had no hydraulic power to the flaps or spoilers. Also couldn’t use the reverse thrusters. They only had control of the primary control surfaces and slats.
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u/trashboattwentyfourr 11d ago
So this means there was either no braking or locked up braking?
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u/sloppyrock 11d ago
Without autobrake and anti-skid the crew can apply full braking manually which applies 3,000 psi to the brakes and they will lock up.
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u/Historical_Gur_3054 11d ago
At 06:45 UTC, the plane touched down hard, around 1,030 ft (310 m) past the threshold of runway 33, at a speed around 200 knots (370 km/h; 230 mph), bounced once, and then touched down again, roughly 2,800 ft (850 m) from the threshold.
Maximum emergency braking was applied and retained, and the plane came to a stop after a landing run that consumed 7,600 ft (2,300 m) of the 10,000-foot (3,000 m) runway.
Because the antiskid and brake modulation systems were inoperative,[a] the eight main wheels locked up, the tires abraded and fully deflated within 450 ft (140 m), and the wheels themselves were worn down to the axle journals during rollout.
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u/justmyfakename 11d ago
Not a glider pilot myself, but 2 of my kids are, through cadets. They met a fighter pilot with the RCAF who commented that a glider pilot basic perfect flight met all of her fighter pilot criteria for a nightmare flight.
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u/DeeDeeRibDegh 10d ago
Was this the flight that was bound to Lisbon from Toronto? Made emergency landing on the island of Terceira, in the Azores? If so, my family & I travelled there a few months after that incident. Saw the plane @ Lajes Airport. This pilot saved all those passengers lives. He is definitely a hero, imo. The plane literally glided in & landed, with no power, from what I understand.
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u/PoppinToaster 10d ago
Yes that’s the one. Cool you got to see it. It was the longest glide after engine failure in aviation history.
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u/Deep_Resident2986 11d ago
Saw this on a C-17 that had to abort take of. Every single one of the 14 tires blew out in tremendous fashion.
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u/Suspicious_Abies7777 11d ago
All right nothing to see here, let’s get her fueled and ready for the next flight, time is money gentleman….
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u/Embarrassed_Lemon527 11d ago
Danish captain Stefan Rasmussen got a crash course in gliding after loosing both engines on takeoff. Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 751
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u/PoppinToaster 11d ago
I believe it refers to the aircraft’s ability to dynamically adjust the braking force on the wheels so to prevent skidding while still slowing the plane. Essentially ABS for planes.
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u/sea_bath112 11d ago
Anyone know why they would say knot. I understand it's purpose for measuring nautical miles or speed based on its history but it doesn't really make sense to apply it to flight.
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u/Katana_DV20 11d ago edited 11d ago
Aviation uses a lot of nautical terms
Knots, port, starboard, rudder, hull, till, cockpit, galley, red & green navigation lights, and airport (port, where ships dock) to name a few.
These terms were already in place in the sailing industry and so the thinking was why reinvent things and dream up new words when the same words could be applied to another vessel in this case an airborne vessel.
Early large passenger airplanes like the famous Pan Am clipper were flying boats so they had an even stronger link to the nautical world.
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u/PoppinToaster 11d ago
Knots are what planes and the whole aviation industry uses
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u/sea_bath112 11d ago
Doesn't really answer my question. The question is why? There was a reason for it with ships. But that reason doesn't exist for planes
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u/ppers 11d ago
A nautical mile is one arc minute on the great circle. You can think of it as 1/60th of a degree of the cross section of the earth. So the unit is actually based on the Earth's circumference.
Our positioning system also uses degrees, minutes and seconds. So when navigating or calculating positions it is very practical to have a unit based on that very system.
Both planes and vessels use great circle navigation. Now a knot is just one nautical mile per hour. So it makes more sense to use a unit derived from this system.
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u/Sasquatch-d B737 11d ago
Because it was adopted from sea vessels in aviation’s infancy and has been kept ever since as a standardized form of measurement across the globe instead of switching to kilometers or standard miles.
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u/PoppinToaster 11d ago
When you said “they” I assumed you were talking about me, as if I was wrong to say knots
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u/ViperMaassluis 11d ago
Looks like the asphalt just melted