June 16, 2020 Fake News

The Liberty Gazette

June 16, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: A friend tagged us in a Facebook post, asking, “What could have caused this? Didn't think the comments were too funny with the seriousness of this landing.” Linked to the post was a video of a wild ride that began with a steep angle of descent to landing, forcing the nose wheel of a 747 to slam down first, causing the airliner to bounce dramatically down the runway, dipping wings to scrape the ground at high speed, until the aircraft was back under control and stopped.

The video was one she saw on Twitter, posted by someone in Germany. The translation was, “After the LOCKDOWN I wait a little bit until the pilots are back in practice.”

The first clue that this person tweeting doesn’t know beans about aviation is that he called it “practice.” But the video itself caught many off-guard.

Mike: Microsoft Flight Simulator has an animation program, and this video was produced on that, or something similar. Sometimes, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will use such a program to take the data from the black boxes (flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder) to reproduce a mishap so they can visualize an accident sequence. In this way, major or contributing factors are identified, and the aviation world learns how to prevent similar situations by incorporating this knowledge into pilot training. This is one reason airline travel is statistically the safest mode of transportation.

This video, however, appeared to have been produced by a hobbyist. One of the big clues in the video is when you see the two left engines, which hang down from the wing, disappear into the runway and then come out undamaged.

The 747 has four main gear trucks. Each truck has four tires. Add the two tires on the nose gear, and you have an 18-wheeler. The landing weight of the airplane is somewhere in the range of 200 tons, all of which is put squarely on the four main trucks. There is no way those two small nose tires could take the impact at that amount of energy without being crushed, let alone cause a bounce.

Linda: I got wind shear once coming in to Front Range, Colorado. The wind changed directions about 10 feet above the runway, just past the threshold. I didn’t plant a nose wheel on the landing, but the sudden removal of lift dropped us pretty hard. Fortunately, there was no damage. But wind shear can ruin your day. So can poor decisions. Fortunately, no one was harmed during the making of that video, but an unstabilized approach, as portrayed by the simulation, could be disastrous.

Even with the long periods of inactivity, pilot training has continued. No airline pilot will set foot onto a flight deck and no U.S. airline would assign a pilot unless they were clearly ready to fly, meeting all the regulatory requirements for currency and competency.

This video is making its rounds, so don’t be fooled by fake news.

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