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Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

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Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#81

Post by sowbug »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #68
devoutsalsa wrote: post #2

This isn't common, but it's pretty routine. Pilots are trained for this, and the aircraft are designed to handle the stress.

> the aircraft are designed to handle the stress. I wonder how the runway fares after this.

Not answering your question, but a bit of interesting trivia for you. Large passenger airplanes routinely take off with too much fuel to land safely. If one took off, circled the airport once, and landed, then it might actually break apart on landing because of the mass of the fuel being sloshed around as the airplane touches down. That's why planes preferably dump or burn off excess fuel before an unscheduled early landing.

There are also rules about exactly where a plane can touch down on the runway. Only some of a runway is engineered to be strong enough to bear the weight of a massive plane dropping onto the pavement. The rest is called a "displaced threshold" and is OK for parking, taxiing, and taking off.

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#82

Post by devoutsalsa »

mindslight wrote: post #72
piva00 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you can see a YT Shorts that a passenger inside the flight shot, it's actually much less stressful than I imagined: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W12w7NkqGCM

What's the actual point of Youtube Sharts? It just seems like encouragement for people to film vertically and not frame the shot well. And on the watching side you're pushed into a needlessly unfriendly UI. Like I generally just use the YT web interface and don't go out of my way to routinely yt-dlp or Newpipe, but now I might have to change that.

[flagged]

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#83

Post by 4ggr0 »

mindslight wrote: post #72
piva00 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you can see a YT Shorts that a passenger inside the flight shot, it's actually much less stressful than I imagined: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W12w7NkqGCM

What's the actual point of Youtube Sharts? It just seems like encouragement for people to film vertically and not frame the shot well. And on the watching side you're pushed into a needlessly unfriendly UI. Like I generally just use the YT web interface and don't go out of my way to routinely yt-dlp or Newpipe, but now I might have to change that.

> What's the actual point of Youtube Shorts?

To be an alternative to TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or other short-form video platforms.

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#84

Post by throwway120385 »

stef25 wrote: post #33
colejohnson66 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the pilots are indeed trained on how to handle these situations, the passengers will be fine. Maybe a bit shaken up from having to evacuate on the tarmac (especially if they have a fear of flying), but they'll be fine.

Flying for me ain't fun but as soon the bird is on the ground I'm all good!

Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing.

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#85

Post by danpalmer »

sowbug wrote: post #81
pavel_lishin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the aircraft are designed to handle the stress. I wonder how the runway fares after this.

Not answering your question, but a bit of interesting trivia for you. Large passenger airplanes routinely take off with too much fuel to land safely. If one took off, circled the airport once, and landed, then it might actually break apart on landing because of the mass of the fuel being sloshed around as the airplane touches down. That's why planes preferably dump or burn off excess fuel before an unscheduled early…

Oooh, this is something I know a little about. At university we were tasked with building software for estimating the usable area of a runway given its configuration and obstacles.

Runways have 3-4 different defined areas, each with different properties and usable in different ways. For example, the grass at the sides is important for safety, must be cleared a certain distance back, must not rise above a certain level above the tarmac, etc, and all those rules are distinct from the rules that apply to the concrete at the ends of the runway, distinct from the rules regarding surrounding buildings and trees, and so on. The area managed as a runway can extend kilometers out on every side.

Now, if you have a plane break down at one end, or a support vehicle crash on the grass or something, you don't actually have to put the runway out of action, but you do have to re-declare the usable distance, and that's based on the location, size, and importantly height of the obstacle. You then need to plot the angle of landing/takeoff based on that height, accounting for the segment of the runway it's in, and the given runway's pre-approved angle (varies by city/terrain).

It was a fascinating project and a good example of how problems are often so much more complex and nuanced than they initially appear.

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#87

Post by snovv_crash »

lr1970 wrote: post #57
chrisldgk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airplanes rarely get scrapped for parts because of incidents like this. They have pretty extensive maintenance and repair checklists, but afaik the rate of making vessels like this airworthy is pretty high.

> Airplanes rarely get scrapped for parts because of incidents like this. They have pretty extensive maintenance and repair checklists, ... And yet these "extensive maintenance checklists" did not prevent such a serious malfunction. They were lucky that the weather was cooperating. In bad weather and strong winds who knows what would have happened.

Weather had nothing to do with it. They had a warning light come on during landing that the nose gear had a safety issue, so they did another few passes, requested emergency services available at touchdown, and then did effectively a pretty normal landing (just holding the nose up a little longer than normal).

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#88

Post by throwanem »

londons_explore wrote: post #75
tallanvor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you want to burn fuel, but it sounds like that wasn't needed here.

If you suspect you're gonna turn into a hunk of bent metal sliding down the runway, I'd rather there only be a couple of gallons of fuel left, rather than a couple of hundred gallons.

In the scale of amounts of fuel aircraft carry, 30 minutes of fuel is "a couple of gallons". You don't want enough to overstress the airframe or fuel a massive conflagration if the tanks are compromised, but you also don't want so little that you've got no buffer in case something else goes wrong, and 30 minutes at cruise (or at the near-idle power settings used on approach, it isn't clear here) is a lot less at takeoff/go-around power.

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#89

Post by cbhl »

gmtplus8 wrote: post #10

Non-USA resident here. Can someone explain all the four-letter news station names to me? Why not brand them with something more memorable / locally nuanced?

This Wikipedia article provides a good overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...

Re: Delta flight lands in Charlotte without front landing gear

#90

Post by mindslight »

4ggr0 wrote: post #83
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the actual point of Youtube Sharts? It just seems like encouragement for people to film vertically and not frame the shot well. And on the watching side you're pushed into a needlessly unfriendly UI. Like I generally just use the YT web interface and don't go out of my way to routinely yt-dlp or Newpipe, but now I might have to change that.

> What's the actual point of Youtube Shorts? To be an alternative to TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or other short-form video platforms.

Sure, I meant for the people actually using it. Like if you want TikTok just continuing using TikTok, which you know is "mobile-first" and thus craptastic in a regular browser but presumably you don't care. But Google seems to have just blindly copied TikTok and enshittified their existing product to push it, when they could have integrated it into normal Youtube and made something better than both.
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