Belly Landing

In these situations Emilio, you always want to fly the aircraft nose down to
the ground. Never want it to drop because even a two or three foot drop
will most likely severely damage the aircraft. B-1B landed at Edwards in
the late 80's with the nose gear up and, with no practice for this manuever,
the pilot let it fall about two feet onto the nose. Lots of damage. He had
the idea to fly it down, but without any reference picture or practice, it
fell the last two feet.


I remember that one, it was show live on some cable news channels.


Ron
Pilot/Wildland Firefighter

"Ron" wrote in message
...

In these situations Emilio, you always want to fly the aircraft nose down
to
the ground. Never want it to drop because even a two or three foot drop
will most likely severely damage the aircraft. B-1B landed at Edwards in
the late 80's with the nose gear up and, with no practice for this
manuever,
the pilot let it fall about two feet onto the nose. Lots of damage. He
had
the idea to fly it down, but without any reference picture or practice,
it
fell the last two feet.


I remember that one, it was show live on some cable news channels.


Ron
Pilot/Wildland Firefighter

The aircraft commander was a squadron mate of mine. We were sitting #1 for
T.O. when he came back to the base with the nose gear retracted. He hit the
rwy hard on a couple of patterns trying to knock it loose but stuck it
remained. Off he went to EDW. We were taking off to go to a static display
at Luke AFB so paralled his flight path, a few dozen miles away of course,
as he flew out to the dry lake bed. He was on squadron common talking to
the tanker and getting relay info from Rockwell engineers and we got to
listen in to all that. Pretty exciting day all in all :-)

Jim

"Jim Baker" wrote:

Pretty exciting day all in all :-)

Jim


Probably not quite as exciting as his though!...
--

-Gord.