Local expert: Airbus gear has failed before

It may have looked dramatic and hair-raising on television, but the pilots who successfully landed their damaged Airbus jet Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport did exactly what they were trained to do, a well-known aviation safety expert said.

"They did a textbook job. It went exactly according to the book," said John Nance of Tacoma, a former 737 pilot for Alaska Airlines and a noted aviation author.


		AP
	Flames shoot up from the broken nose gear of a JetBlue plane as it barrels along on its emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport. The plane landed safely. (AP Photo/Stephen Carr, Long Beach Press-Telegram)

The JetBlue A320 carrying 146 people made a safe emergency landing after pilots discovered the front landing gear was stuck with the wheels turned sideways and aborted the flight to New York.

Nance, an aviation analyst for ABC News, said all commercial pilots train for this kind of emergency.

"The bottom line is that a nose gear problem is not that big of a deal," said Nance, who watched the landing on television in Virginia, where he was on a business trip.

Nance said he was more interested in the fact that there have been reports of two other incidents of nose wheel problems on the same kind of Airbus plane.

"The FAA and others are going to have to take a hard look at this," Nance said. "I'm worried. Three times is too many."


	Analyst John Nance says the A320 has a problem.

Airbus, maker of the A320, could not be immediately reached last night for comment about Nance's claim.

Nance said a similar incident happened in 1999 on an America West plane and then again last year on a United jet.

Both of those planes also landed safely, Nance said.

"How this played out is exactly what we would have expected," Airbus spokeswoman Mary Anne Greczyn told Bloomberg News. "It is something these pilots are trained to deal with and that the plane definitely can withstand."

Airbus has people at Long Beach who will work with JetBlue on studying the problem, Greczyn said. The cause of the problem will be determined in the days to come, she said.

Although there were some reports that the JetBlue plane was dumping fuel during the more than three hours it circled the airport before landing, Nance said the pilots were simply burning off fuel. There is no fuel-dump system on the A320, unlike on bigger widebody planes, he said.

The A320 does not have a maximum landing weight, he said, meaning it can land with as much fuel as it had on takeoff.

"There was no hurry to get the plane on the ground," Nance said. The extra time in the air not only burned off fuel, but would have given the crew time to talk with maintenance people on the ground as well as the airplane maker, Nance said.

"There is plenty of time to get a lot of heads together," he said.

This kind of landing on the main gear is fairly simple, he said.

The pilot holds the nose gear off the ground until the plane's speed is reduced to about 65 or 70 knots, or about 50 knots below the landing speed.

Then the pilot gently brings the nose wheel to the runway and hits the brakes and deploys the engine thrust reversers to slow the plane as quickly as possible.

It is important to put the nose wheel down before loss of elevator control once the speed is too slow, Nance said. Otherwise, the nose wheel would slam hard into the runway.

In this kind of emergency, Nance added, there is less than a 1 percent chance of "something going badly."

P-I aerospace reporter James Wallace can be reached at 206-448-8040 or jameswallace@seattlepi.com.

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