audiboy
Hail the power of Quattro
***WARNING***
This is a long read, but I trimmed it as much as I could.
Well, I had a very interesting night last night at work. As some of you may know, I'm an aircraft mechanic for the C-130 aircraft in the USAF. My shop specializes in heavy maintenance of critical components and crash recovery.
I got into work last night and sat down at a computer to check my e-mail and my shift supervisor walks up to me and says "We've got a serious problem". He told me that there was an aircraft flying around that couldn't get all of the landing gear to come down and locked. After some quick brainstorming, we headed down to the squadron that owned the aircraft to get some initial information. After we got all we could from them(read: not much at all) we headed down to the maintenance operations control center to talk to the crew while they were flying around. They gave us a detailed description of what was going on and we gave them everything we could think of to try and fix the problem. We spent over a 1.5 hours trying to calm them down and getting them to try out all of our suggestions. None of the suggestions we had fixed the problem and we got to the point where there was literally nothing else that could be done other than to land the way it was and pray that they didn't hurt themselves or the aircraft. As a mechanic that specializes in certain systems, you never want to have to tell a crew that there is nothing else that they can do to get that aircraft safe to land. I would have been a lot more upset if we couldn't think of anything to fix it, but we just ran out of options with the emergency procedures that could be performed.
The good news is that the nose gear and the left side landing gear was down and locked. The bad news was that only the front assembly on the right side gear was down and locked and the rear assembly was 3' from being down. For the model of 130 that this was, that was really bad news. When an aircraft with multiple main landing gear assemblies for each side lands, they land of the rear tire. This wasn't an option for these guys.
After they dumped/used the majority of their fuel, it was time to land. Everyone with a radio was out waiting for it to land, because a situation like this is very rare, only happening about once in every 4 or 5 years. We had all of our crash equipment ready and waiting, just in case we needed it. They made their approach, which was a very slow and low one, and landed. You could have heard a needle hit the ground with as quiet as it was. The new guys were all just interested in what was going on. The experienced guys all knew what could happen if just one small thing went wrong.
Thankfully, they landed the aircraft as well as anyone could and didn't break much else. There were a few fires from hydraulic fluid and hot brakes, but the fire department handled those. After the fire department cleared the scene, it was our turn.
We inspected the aircraft to make sure it was safe to work, which it was. Since we were on an active runway, we needed to work fast and cleared the aircraft off in just under 4 hours. We did quite a bit of work(changed a tire, removed a seized brake, jacked and down jacked the aircraft, and one or two other minor things, then towed it off of the runway) in a short amount of time with a lot of spectators asking a lot of questions and taking a lot of pictures. It's times like these where I'm thankful that I work with a few really good technicians and others that are well on there way to becoming good mechanics. I been a part of quite a few crash teams and through plenty of crash exercises and scenarios, but this was the best organized one from our standpoint to date.
Like I said up top, this was a long read, but I thought some of you might enjoy the story.
This is a long read, but I trimmed it as much as I could.
Well, I had a very interesting night last night at work. As some of you may know, I'm an aircraft mechanic for the C-130 aircraft in the USAF. My shop specializes in heavy maintenance of critical components and crash recovery.
I got into work last night and sat down at a computer to check my e-mail and my shift supervisor walks up to me and says "We've got a serious problem". He told me that there was an aircraft flying around that couldn't get all of the landing gear to come down and locked. After some quick brainstorming, we headed down to the squadron that owned the aircraft to get some initial information. After we got all we could from them(read: not much at all) we headed down to the maintenance operations control center to talk to the crew while they were flying around. They gave us a detailed description of what was going on and we gave them everything we could think of to try and fix the problem. We spent over a 1.5 hours trying to calm them down and getting them to try out all of our suggestions. None of the suggestions we had fixed the problem and we got to the point where there was literally nothing else that could be done other than to land the way it was and pray that they didn't hurt themselves or the aircraft. As a mechanic that specializes in certain systems, you never want to have to tell a crew that there is nothing else that they can do to get that aircraft safe to land. I would have been a lot more upset if we couldn't think of anything to fix it, but we just ran out of options with the emergency procedures that could be performed.
The good news is that the nose gear and the left side landing gear was down and locked. The bad news was that only the front assembly on the right side gear was down and locked and the rear assembly was 3' from being down. For the model of 130 that this was, that was really bad news. When an aircraft with multiple main landing gear assemblies for each side lands, they land of the rear tire. This wasn't an option for these guys.
After they dumped/used the majority of their fuel, it was time to land. Everyone with a radio was out waiting for it to land, because a situation like this is very rare, only happening about once in every 4 or 5 years. We had all of our crash equipment ready and waiting, just in case we needed it. They made their approach, which was a very slow and low one, and landed. You could have heard a needle hit the ground with as quiet as it was. The new guys were all just interested in what was going on. The experienced guys all knew what could happen if just one small thing went wrong.
Thankfully, they landed the aircraft as well as anyone could and didn't break much else. There were a few fires from hydraulic fluid and hot brakes, but the fire department handled those. After the fire department cleared the scene, it was our turn.
We inspected the aircraft to make sure it was safe to work, which it was. Since we were on an active runway, we needed to work fast and cleared the aircraft off in just under 4 hours. We did quite a bit of work(changed a tire, removed a seized brake, jacked and down jacked the aircraft, and one or two other minor things, then towed it off of the runway) in a short amount of time with a lot of spectators asking a lot of questions and taking a lot of pictures. It's times like these where I'm thankful that I work with a few really good technicians and others that are well on there way to becoming good mechanics. I been a part of quite a few crash teams and through plenty of crash exercises and scenarios, but this was the best organized one from our standpoint to date.
Like I said up top, this was a long read, but I thought some of you might enjoy the story.
