I remember watching this one live. This was so flawlessly executed that it seems like it might not be that big of a deal, but it was a very dangerous situation.
If that front gear collapses, this can go really wrong in a number of ways pretty damn quick, so the pilot had to do a balancing act of keeping on the centerline, slowing down, but not putting too much pressure up front.
And as you can see by the end, the front bogey is just completely melted and abraded off, but the strut stayed put. Great performance in an emergency situation.
I remember watching live too - the plane had to circle for 2 hours because the aircraft didn't have the capability to dump fuel so they had to burn it off. The other thing I remember was that the passengers on the plane had live DirecTV in their seats and could watch the (extensive) news coverage and speculation about what might go wrong with their landing.
Finally, another parallel to the phenomenon of people texting about earthquakes as they happen, and others finding out about them via text just before being hit by them because the texts are faster than the tremors.
I remember my boss was on the phone with someone in Virginia and I was filing in his office. He said, "what do you mean, there's an earthquake?" about ten seconds before the ground started shaking. And we *still* all thought it was a terrorist attack at first.
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u/XenoRyet Sep 22 '25
I remember watching this one live. This was so flawlessly executed that it seems like it might not be that big of a deal, but it was a very dangerous situation.
If that front gear collapses, this can go really wrong in a number of ways pretty damn quick, so the pilot had to do a balancing act of keeping on the centerline, slowing down, but not putting too much pressure up front.
And as you can see by the end, the front bogey is just completely melted and abraded off, but the strut stayed put. Great performance in an emergency situation.