That was a nice 150 million dollar landing. Having worked on hydraulic flight control systems there are 4 ways to get the landing gear down in most large planes.

1. Hydraulic System 1 (HS1)
2. Hydraulic System 2 (HS2)
3. The bottle, a pressurized canister in case of HS1 and HS2 failure
4. The hand pump

It will be interesting to see the cause of a quad redundant system failure. Their is a locking system but in case of lock failure I thought you could just pop the breaker and let the main hydraulics rip it off the mount.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...KWcM_story.html

I'm suspecting breakers myself, given this layout, and the fact it didn't even look like the MLG doors came open:

http://www.smartcockpit.com/data/pdfs/plane/boeing/b767/instructor/B767_Hydraulics.pdf

I'm not assuming the breakers are where the aircrew has access to them like they did on a BUFF. Also:

http://www.smartcockpit.com/data/pdfs/plane/boeing/b767/systems/Boeing_767-300-Landing_Gear.pdf Page 2 for the MLG.

Found airfield vid; nose gear didn't deploy either:

on final:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scUoqzG67-w&NR=1

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chibKHxis1g&NR=1

Good job by the air crew.

<img src="/forums/images/graemlins/patriot.gif" alt="" />

"Any landing you walk away from..."

There is something to be said for a taildragger, I guess.

I have a friend who is in the landing gear dept. at Delta. Some of the stories will make you cringe. Like the one where the gear down and locked lights came on just fine. The problem was that they did not come down at all. A very experienced captain knew it didn't feel right and got somebody to eyeball it. Surprise, surprise. Or the one where the same mirror image pin in the main gear broke on both sides on the same "not hard" landing.

On the F-18 the landing gear lever looks like a stick with a wheel on the end <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/lol.gif" alt="" />

In the old days the least mechanically inclined Marine would be put on "wheels watch" at the start of the airfield.
He had a radio, binoculars and a flare. He would watch the incoming aircraft for landing gear. If the craft didn't have it's wheels down he would pop the flare and yell "wheels wheels wheels" on the radio.

Of course now days you have "Betty" the computer voice.

Your might think pilots can be stupid but their brains are scrambled from high G loads. At least thats the fighter pilot excuse.

In the 30's, there was a scientific study of the relationship of intelligence to the ability to be taught to fly a plane. A high grade moron, IQ in the 80's, was found to be most suitable, least distractable, most able to follow checklists. The armed forces and the airlines apparently took this study to heart, and put the really smart people in maintenance. The moral of the story? Any idiot can fly the plane. It takes a smart guy to fix what they screw up....

Hey!!! I resembled that remark. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/scared.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/scared.gif" alt="" />

That's no joke and a sad condition... from multiple years of high altitude chamber training to grey out conditions, which we now know causes permanent brain damage, poor oxygen systems in one of the trainers flown when he was an instructor, and carrier launches with 2000lb bombs on an F-8 for which it was never designed to handle (afterburner lit off on deck, 1/3 fuel load, max cat thrust).

Effects started showing up in his mid '50s.

from his obit: Harold (Hal, aka "Smiley" when in the cockpit of the F-8), took his last solo flight October 23, 2011, a man with a kind soul, an aviator's spirit, and a fighter to the end. He's at peace and will be forever flying with the angels in his pride and glory F-8 Crusader.

And I bet if he'd known it was going to happen that way, he'd still would have climbed into the cockpit and flown away in the last and best of the gunfighers.

It takes a certain type to fly a fighter. The game is a binary solution set. You die or he dies. We celebrate the man who is successful in 5 such encounters and call him an ace. The odds of such success are 1 in 32 (which is 2^5). The odds of being dead are 31 in 32 after 5 such encounters. This proves either pilots can't count that high with their shoes on, or they just don't care, or they are brave beyond all reason. Special in any case. I've known some pretty bright pilots. I think it's the last case for most of the good ones, plus a supreme confidence in their own ability, plus a lot of training. And a lot of dead friends. My son lost a close college friend in military jet training, an equipment failure.

My brother used to fly F-4's and later, F-15's. He also flew OV-10's, RF-4's and some other hardware. He said that he realized that being second-best wasn't so bad after all when he noticed that the best guy always got killed.

I never thought about the 2 to the 5th power thing. But it's not just supreme confidence in oneself. It's the training and tactics, the support of everyone who keeps the craft in the air and the fact that the U.S. makes some darn good stuff. Take the F-15 as an example: We decided that the F-22 needed to be made to maintain air superiority, yet the F-15 has never been beaten in air-to-air combat. Service delivery on that plane began in 1974 and it's still viable.

John B.

Which is why I've seen a lot of pancaking in the flight sim with these guys, fixated on flying approach in weather. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/shame.gif" alt="" /> Probably more than we care to realize. He climbs out of the cockpit honked off as hell, but still on his feet without loss of aircraft, so that's a good thing.

Germany back in the '80s was a bad time for USAF flying. Picked up a lot of class A and B mishaps over there, to the point the Germans made us stand down for 2 months thru the holidays, then the weather kept us down for yet another month after that. Real downer. Did a lot of academics on both side of Ops.

The maintainers' saying is "It takes a college education to break 'em, and a high school education to fix 'em". <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/nana.gif" alt="" />