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Voor de ongeduldigen onder ons, "het wonder" gaat geschieden ergens na 1.10 minuten...
http://aviationnewsdaily.com/2011/03/28 ... er-planes/
MONTREAL – The amateur video footage illustrates the latest landing-gear incident involving a Bombardier Inc. plane in dramatic fashion, this one in Rouyn Noranda on Sunday.
The Quebec government’s own medical evacuation plane, a Challenger CL601, swoops in from the distance, its two rear sets of landing wheels touching down. But the nose landing gear is nowhere in sight.
The plane with five people aboard, including a medical patient being airlifted, rolls along on its rear landing gear for a stretch and takes off again.
On the second approach, partially obscured by emergency vehicles idling – at least the second landing attempt recorded on the four-minute, 11-second video – the white-and-blue jet again attempts the manoeuvre that pilots call a “touch-and-go,” meant to give the nose landing system a jolt in an effort to dislodge it.
It seems to be no more successful, again rolling along on its rear wheels with the nose landing gear still missing in action.
But as the plane glides along, the videographer’s view becomes obstructed by a snowbank for a few seconds.
When it emerges from the obstructed view, the landing gear has deployed and the plane coasts to a stop.
“That’s amazing, I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Paul Strachan said on Monday.
Strachan is no casual viewer; he’s the president of the Air Canada Pilots Association who has flown military and commercial airplanes for decades.
Clément Falardeau, a spokesperson for Quebec’s Treasury Board who was deputized to answer media calls, confirmed that the plane in Sunday’s incident was the same aircraft involved in a similar incident in 2006, when the nose-landing gear also failed to deploy.
The Challenger was later flown with special authorization from Transport Canada to Quebec City for an investigation.
Strachan said that in such cases, planes are usually flown at low speed with the landing gear down.
“To me, it looks like the pilots did everything right in this instance,” he added after viewing the video.
Falardeau said the plane circled around for an hour and a quarter to burn excess fuel before attempting to land and tried various manoeuvres to try to dislodge the landing gear that was stuck in the wheel well.
He could not say what they were, but pilots also try to bank hard to loosen stuck gear, or “freefalling the gear,” said Strachan – that is, unlocking the mechanical system that assists the hydraulic landing-gear apparatus and hope gravity will do the job as the pilot drops fast and picks up speed.
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