Blimey, talk about making a fuss!
In all fairness this was clearly not a trivial situation for the poor guys involved.
As best I understand it, it's the afternoon of 16 October and what I'm pretty confident is a Diamond DA42 with an instructor and student on board is returning to their Wuzhou Airport base. One way or another it turns out that the left main gear won't lower. Cue a pretty impressive emergency plan...
In all fairness this was clearly not a trivial situation for the poor guys involved. As best I understand it, it's the afternoon of 16 October and what I'm pretty confident is a Diamond DA42 with an instructor and student on board is returning to their Wuzhou Airport base. One way or another it turns out that the left main gear won't lower. Cue a pretty impressive emergency plan...
Now I'm not absolutely clear from the text or picture
just what configuration the aircraft is in. From the pic there's no
sign of either main gear, but the nose gear looks as if it may have
deployed. Anyway, it's decided that it would be a good idea to
basically exhaust the fuel before attempting a belly landing of some
sort. So the crew (although I suspect the student's opinion is neither
requested nor profferred) circles for no less than six hours to burn
off fuel, apparently deciding that a night-landing at getting on for
midnight is preferable to trying the same thing in daylight but with
fuel on board.
And just to be on the safe side for this light twin, the fire department with its 20 trucks (count 'em), clearly thrilled at having the opportunity to show it knows what it's doing, lays a foam carpet - all 50 tonnes and 3,000ft of it!
But you can't argue with results - and the result in this case is a slightly the worse for wear DA42, and no doubt a student and instructor quite pleased to see the back of each other.
A colleague of mine on Aviation Week grabbed the opportunity to go on combat air patrol with an Arabic pilot in an F-15 policing the Iraq no-fly zone a while back. Eight peaceful hours of racetracks later he was fairly seriously reviewing his career choices.
And just to be on the safe side for this light twin, the fire department with its 20 trucks (count 'em), clearly thrilled at having the opportunity to show it knows what it's doing, lays a foam carpet - all 50 tonnes and 3,000ft of it!
But you can't argue with results - and the result in this case is a slightly the worse for wear DA42, and no doubt a student and instructor quite pleased to see the back of each other.
A colleague of mine on Aviation Week grabbed the opportunity to go on combat air patrol with an Arabic pilot in an F-15 policing the Iraq no-fly zone a while back. Eight peaceful hours of racetracks later he was fairly seriously reviewing his career choices.
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