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Sukhoi Superjet 100 Wheels Up Landing During Autoland Testing

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Sukhoi says a Superjet 100 involved in a wheels-up landing at Reykjavik Keflavik International Airport in Iceland on July 21 will be repaired and returned to the test program. The Russian manufacturer says the fourth development aircraft, which joined the program in 2010, was in the final phases of autoland certification testing when the accident occurred on the airport’s runway 11. The aircraft, with five onboard, was conducting Cat IIIA autoland tests in crosswinds as well as simulated… (www.aviationweek.com) More...

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Bernie20910
Bernie20910 20
I love this bit in the USA Today article: "the crash … in Iceland has no bearing on the jet's commercial use because the type of landing involved is not currently performed by airlines operating the plane, the aircraft's manufacturer said Monday."

That's 100% correct. The airlines all specify that the gear must be down for a landing. No airline currently performs regular gear up landings.
WALLACE24
WALLACE24 2
That's freakin funny
preacher1
preacher1 1
chiphermes
Chip Hermes 5
Does the superjet really have the ability for the autoland system to drop the gear?
sparkie624
sparkie624 3
If it did, it didn't work. :)
WALLACE24
WALLACE24 1
The article didn't say the approach to 11 was an auto land apprch. That's unclear. May be why it was a gear up.
joelwiley
joel wiley 2
It said that earlier approaches were to 20. This one overflew 11 and went around. Just a conjecture: Assuming that autoland does normally drop the gear, could the go-around reset the computer and uncovered a software problem? Scenario- on approach, lower gear, start go-around- raise gear, re-approach- computer forgot it had pulled gear up. That would make it a software problem.
just a thought.
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
What ever happened... Someone or Something made a mistake.
WALLACE24
WALLACE24 3
Those damn pesky check lists.
dtw757
mike SUT 2
Chip...evidently not
N512C
dave garcia 2
I bet they use the checklist now.
sparkie624
sparkie624 2
What checklist :)
joelwiley
joel wiley 1
With credit to Google Translate:
Какой перечень?
Starman535
Robert Black 1
Maybe they should have looked at the indicator lights in the cockpit to see if the gear was down & locked. All aircraft these days has those indicators, and if they were not on, they could have (presumably) cranked the gear down by hand prior to attempting to land.
preacher1
preacher1 1
Ya thank. lol. I always thought that's what them lights was for. Damn, I been looking at them all these years for nothing?????????????
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
Maybe they should have turned up their hearing aids to hear the gear warning horn, or a GPWS alert that says "TOO LOW, GEAR!"
preacher1
preacher1 4
Maybe they had a Korean pilot and he thought somebody was calling his name. Oops, wait a minute. That's insensitive. But wait a minute; I am.
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
Another version of the landing.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2013/07/22/russian-superjet-belly-lands-in-iceland/2574447/
cssimms
Stan Simms 1
Be careful- there are those who have and those who will.....
joelwiley
joel wiley 1
If I recall, a C5A did it at Travis AFB in 1985 while practicing touch and go. Wasn't the skidplate variant.
TXCAVU
Aircraft 68-0216 (C-5A) belly landing in 1985 at Travis AFB, CA. I lived in the Bay area at that time and it wasn't pretty.
joelwiley
joel wiley 1
I think the alarm had been silenced by the flight instructor. Was and still am under KMHR approach- it was still AF back then.
holtrick
holtrick 1
is this available for OSX?
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
LOL, maybe it should be... that way they could have practiced first.
209flyboy
209flyboy 1
Oh yes they do practice!! Ref: Sukhoi at Reykjavik, C5A at Travis AFB, Jet Blue at LAX, Southwest at LGA, Asiana at SFO. Results have been varied from revalation, stupidity, inattention to check list or airline scheduled gear up landings. Probably stupidity!
egad
James Hodges 1
Gear up landing: There are those who have, and those who will, according to myCFI!!!
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
Are you a "Will" or a "Have Been" :)
pilot7
Milt Reel 1
Oh yeah! they are Russians, ha ha ha!
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
I wonder if they were Drug & Alcohol Tested... You know the Russian Reputation and Vodka.

mick44
mick44 1
t'is easy to forget - especially when something interrupts the normal. Was landing in Columbia, Ca had someone too close in front of me and did a go round. on return to final - "gear up" alarm let me know that I screwed up . Dropped the gear and landed normally. Wasn't hard to overlook it.
hopskip
Either there was a landing gear deployment failure (ie hydraulics or mechanical) or ... there's 2 test pilot jobs that just became vacant at Sukhoi.

Landing Checklist: Gear down; 3 green, (various other items) Flaps - set (landing flap setting).

Someone forgot The landing gear, then the landing checklist. That involves both pilots up the front end and would be a massive oversight.. or there was some kind of failure in the landing gear deployment (which should have resulted in a go around, and a declaration of emergency so that emergency/fire/rescue could be on standby for the gear-up/partial deployment landing.)

Isn't this the same aircraft type that did a CFIT in Indonesia recently? That was poor pilot judgement and lack of any planning. Bit too much "The Right Stuff" type of test piloting going on with this testing program perhaps? Not enough caution and procedure?

I know that Flight Testing isn't standard ops, but sitting there fat dumb and happy as the aircraft lands itself without doing simple checks like "Landing Gear, Down, 3 green" and intervening if required, (go around if needed) isn't really conducive to a good outcome, if indeed that is what happened.

I wonder what the testing team in the back of the aircraft, presumably with all sorts of testing equipment and displays, who are not flying the aircraft, were thinking? Surely their testing program has more than the standard 2 flight crew in the cockpit right? so how many pairs of eyes missed the status of the landing gear?

Alternitavley they went around, got the emergency services out, and conducted an emergency landing with a failed gear, in which case this report is missing lots of detail!
sparkie624
sparkie624 2
No knowing this a/c and not wanting to falsely accuse the crew, maybe nothing indicated wrong. Note the Gear up touch and go in BOS a number of years ago. Had a gear handle disagree with 3 green, but all gear retracted.

http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/belfast/emb135gearuplanding/emb135Gearuplanding.htm

Maybe something similar happened.
dtw757
mike SUT 1
Must have been Captain We Tu Low again and his new co-pilot Beli Flop.
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
You forgot the 3rd member of the crew I C NohTing
joelwiley
joel wiley 0
Hu Got Gear was PNF
LordLayton
Gear Down? NYET!

[This poster has been suspended.]

honzanl
honza nl 2
Yes, that's why US astronauts fly Russian rockets right now, isn't it ?
And please name me one US-made regional jet airliner in production right now....
And talking about being smart: when due to a lack of gravity astronauts discovered you could not use a pen to write, NASA in an all-American way spent 1 million dollar to design a pen able to write in space.
Russians just decided to take a 10 cents pencil instead...
So who used its brains?
KrauseAware2
John Krause 2
The million dollar pen is almost an urban legend
NASA Did NOT finance the zero-gravity pen
Paul Fisher, of Fisher Pen, had it created on his own at his company's expense
NASA and Russia now buy them now for space flight
sparkie624
sparkie624 1
They needed a pencil so they could change their results later to make them look better.

The US did not need to lie, so they invested into technology and made a way to make things permanent.

:)
tduggan2010
Tim Duggan 1
The "Zero-G Pen versus Pencil" canard has been around so long...originally meant as a joke, now it's become an Urban Legend...and is wholly untrue.

Graphite (lead) pencils can break in use...and pose a severe threat to the electronics in the spacecraft. Besides, those wood shavings are pesky too, every time you sharpen a pencil, and they get loose.......poke in the eye.
preacher1
preacher1 1
That may all be true but I haven't see any auto land systems that put the gear down. They may be smart but I smell a massive brain fart on somebody's part.
michaeld747
Michael Demura -1
(Duplicate Squawk Submitted)

Sukhoi SuperJet Incident

A Sukhoi SuperJet has encountered difficulties while landing in Reykjavik. The landing gear did not look to be deployed upon landing, details are limited at this time.

https://twitter.com/FlightDKM/status/358876310011006976

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