Lufthansa A340-600 Hard landing

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Member for

20 years 5 months

Posts: 10,625

Check out this pilot get it a bit wrong.

You can see the fuselage bend if you watch carefully.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6b7_1395722280

Original post

Member for

14 years 4 months

Posts: 3

Not so much the pilot getting a bit wrong he had a bitch of a crosswind to contend with.

Member for

20 years 5 months

Posts: 10,625

The pilot got it a bit wrong. I've seen pilots make a much smoother landing in windier conditions.
If they were that unstable, they should have gone around. The pilot pointed the nose down right above the runway when they should have flared. They got it wrong. Simple.

Not saying they are a bad pilot or such... just that they got it a smidgen wrong on the flare.

I wonder if Deano would have continued or went around with his craft at such an attitude so late into the landing?

Member for

12 years 8 months

Posts: 400

Chaps, just out of interest, is there a procedure in place to check the aircraft after an incident like this? E.g. are there systems on the a/c that monitor hard landings and flag up some kind of inspection...?

Member for

20 years 5 months

Posts: 10,625

Apparently the plane was grounded, pending inspections on the landing gear.
Certainly, it's return flight back home was cancelled.

I would imagine if a landing trips certain sensors, alarms, etc, then the aircraft needs to be inspected for damage.

Member for

16 years 11 months

Posts: 338

Evil bit of wind just at the worst possible moment. Just before that they did have it in hand. Not sure we could expect much else from the handling pilot. Did well to keep it under some sort of control. Go around call might still have resulted in some sort of touchdown anyway.

Member for

20 years 7 months

Posts: 2,623

I wonder if Deano would have continued or went around with his craft at such an attitude so late into the landing?

It's all too easy to crucify the flight crew. Looking at it the only thing he/she did wrong was lower the nose too much because the ars3 of the aeroplane was not sitting down. They were floating. Notice the level attitude followed by a rather large push forwards. The A340 would be eating up alot more runway than my humble Q400 so it's hard to say whether a baulked landing would have been the better option. Obviously in hindsight it would have been.

Simon - yes engineers can download the G loading data and send it off to Airbus for inspection. I can only speak for my aircraft because I don't have knowledge of how Airbus do theirs but we have two gradings. If it was 2.0g or over then a grade 1 inspection is required before flight. If it was 2.5g or more then a grade 2 inspection is needed. A grade two requires a complete strip down and takes about 10 days so I am led to believe.

Member for

12 years 8 months

Posts: 400

Simon - yes engineers can download the G loading data and send it off to Airbus for inspection. I can only speak for my aircraft because I don't have knowledge of how Airbus do theirs but we have two gradings. If it was 2.0g or over then a grade 1 inspection is required before flight. If it was 2.5g or more then a grade 2 inspection is needed. A grade two requires a complete strip down and takes about 10 days so I am led to believe.

Many thanks Deano, very interesting answer!

The airplane ops manual might have a max demonstrated crosswind, or crosswind limitation, ours has the former. I don't know what the A340's is. But it sure looks like what Deano says- because of the extra airspeed the plane wouldn't sit, and they pushed the nose forward. Another problem with swept wing planes and low slung engines, you can't use any more than about 5 deg wing down. A go-around would have been a better decision in this case, but then, read my signature.

P.S. there are certain events that the aircraft data reporting systems report automatically, I'm not sure if a hard landing is one of them.

Member for

15 years 9 months

Posts: 652

Would this not be wholly down to a gust.???

I would have thought that the computer system on the Airbus would have smoothed out any sudden movements the crew made???

Once upon a time when toothpaste was still white, I piloted a Baron on a group charter flight around Botswana and Zimbabwe. I was coming in to land on a fairly short gravel strip which was surrounded by tall trees. Some of the other aircraft had already landed. The wind was fairly steady. As I flared, the wind swung from headwind to tailwind and my plane floated and floated resulting in a late touchdown and degraded braking action. Because of the trees at the end of the runway, a go-around was not an option. Anyway, the general consensus was "better to overrun the runway at 10 knots than to crash at 120 knots". It was very scary and I just managed to stop before the trees. The other guys had been watching the whole thing and had started running down the runway expecting the yucky to hit the fan. They told me about the change in wind direction as they had been watching the windsock. So yes, the wind can change unexpectedly, although in this case it is quite evident that the wind was howling already on the approach, as indicated in the METAR, and the tower would have been updating it during the approach :
RJAA 180230Z 22021G36KT 190V250 5000 BLDU FEW035 BKN150 18/08 Q1010 WS R16R TEMPO 22030G50KT 3000 BLDU RMK 2CU035 6AC150 A2985
RJAA 180205Z 22026G39KT 4500 BLDU FEW030 SCT050 BKN160 18/08 Q1011 RMK 2CU030 4SC050 6AC160 A2987

Member for

20 years 5 months

Posts: 10,625

oooft!

That last one was brutal. Look at the crease in that fuselage crown!