Mon, Oct 29, 2007
Type Has History Of Nosewheel-Askew Landings
Officials from the NTSB
are investigating why a Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 recently
landed in North Dakota with its nose gear pointed in the
wrong direction.
Witnesses said the landing gear caught fire as the jet slid to a
stop October 20 with its front gear twisted at a 90-degree angle.
No one was hurt. The plane carried 134 passengers and a crew of
four from Minneapolis to Fargo, according to the Associated
Press.
Damage to the aircraft was limited to the nose gear, which has
been removed and replaced, according to Northwest officials. The
airline said the plane is expected to return to service in the
coming days and will return to Minneapolis-St. Paul "on a
non-revenue flight first to ensure that all systems are
operational."
"The crew had some indications of some faults during the flight
and they went through their troubleshooting procedures, did what
they could do," said Pam Sullivan, of the National Transportation
Safety Board office in Chicago.
It was not the first such nose gear incident involving that type
of aircraft, Sullivan said. "We're still trying to determine
exactly what the reasoning was behind this one," she said. "There
have been several of them, but there hasn't been a single cause of
all the other ones, so we're trying to find out exactly what went
wrong in this case."
Twisted nosegears seem to be a curious mechanical quirk of the
A320 family; there have been approximately seven reported incidents
of A320-family planes landing with nosewheels askew, including the
dramatic (some would say over-hyped --
Ed.) televised emergency landing of JetBlue
Flight 292 at LAX in September 2005.
As ANN reported, that
incident led the FAA and CASA to issue airworthiness directives on
A320 nosegear assemblies.
Northwest said the NTSB investigation is ongoing and it is
"premature to speculate on what caused the landing gear to fail" in
this latest incident.
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