Whats WRONG with the Airbus A320 NOSE GEAR?!

what's wrong with the nose gear on the airbus a320 why does it time after time get stuck in 90 degrees in the wrong direction forcing the pilot to make emergency landings well it turns out there's actually much more to this story than meets the eye so stay tuned some of you might remember that back in 2005 there was a very famous and very televised incident where a jetblue flight 292 was forced into an emergency landing in los angeles international airport with its nose gear tilted 90 degrees to the side the landing was very dramatic with a lot of sparks but it ended up okay at the end and it turns out that this was neither the first nor the last such incident to happen to the airbus a320 just last week an air latam airbus a320 was forced in back to land around with 01 in medellin in colombia with what looks like an almost identical problem the really fascinating thing here is that to the untrained eye these incidents they look the same it's the same thing but actually they're caused by very different courses just manifesting themselves in the same way and in this video i'm gonna tell you the fascinating story of five of these incidents i'm gonna explain exactly what happened and also towards the end of the video i'm going to tell you what we as pilots need to think about if we are faced with something like this the first incident that i'm going to tell you about was the one that i mentioned in the beginning of the video jetblueflight292 so this was an airbus a320 that took off from burbank national airport when they tried to race the landing gear they were unable to do so and they started getting these ecam messages the first one was wheel nose wheel steering fault and the second one said landing gear shock absorber fault the crew started to troubleshoot it and they found out that the nose gear had indeed turned to a 90 degree angle towards the direction of travel they eventually after a lot of work managed to get the aircraft safely down on the ground again and when the investigation went in look for the fault of this they found out that the problem was located to the top of the shock absorber which is sitting inside of the nose gear leg the shock absorber is fastened with a support bracket at the top and that support bracket has two logs attached to it the function of those two logs is to stop the shock absorber from being able to rotate freely inside of the leg when they did a borescope inspection of the leg they found that both of these logs had actually fractured off due to fatigue damage and when they started looking to why this fatigue crack had appeared in the first place they found that the fold was likely located to something called the breaking and steering control unit the bscu because the bscu is the computer that controls the nose wheel steering and it had a function in it that was supposed to do a self-test every time that the landing gear was extended the bscu would start to move the nose gear left and right just to check that it was working the problem was that it didn't only do that a couple of times it could do it as many as 57 times for one landing and that in combination with the fact that the investigators found that the pressure inside of the shock absorber was incorrectly serviced had caused a lot of friction and that friction together with this self-test that was going on had caused these fatigue cracks to appear so in response to this airbus came in and changed the software inside of the bscu to make sure that it didn't do so many of these self-tests and they also found that the reason that the shock absorber didn't have the correct pressure inside of it was because of incorrect servicing basically the engineers servicing it with the aircraft with full weight on so what they said was in order to service the shock absorber on the nose wheel you need to jack the aircraft up and then put the correct pressure inside of the shock absorber so that's how they solve the problem a little while later another airbus a320 came in with what looked like an identical fault where the nose gear rotated 90 degrees the aircraft landed and the investigation team went to see what was wrong this time and they found that once again it was the support for the shock absorber that was at fault but not for the same reason this time they found that it had been incorrectly mounted inside of the leg so the mitigation this time was to change the design of that support so it would be impossible to mount it the wrong way then in 2007 another airbus a320 crew received a brake system 2 ecam warning that was then combined with an auto brake max light that just stayed on the crew went through the ecam action items but that didn't solve the problem so instead i thought maybe we should try something different here so they decided to switch the anti-skid and nose wheel steering switch off and then on again to see if that would solve the problem but it didn't make a difference so the crew descended down and did a normal approach and landing and during the landing found out that the nose gear once again was tilted 90 degrees off the directional travel this time the investigation found that there was a hardware problem with the brake and steering control unit the bscu that had caused it to start commanding the nose gear to move to an angle and then the bsu had just frozen up so airbus had to once again come up with a solution to the problem and this time they decided to do a redesign of the bsu they also made a software patch that enabled in case one bscu would freeze up it would swap over automatically to the standby bsco then in 2011 it was time again and this time the crew was in cruise of their airbus a320 when they received two different ecam messages the first was a nab one ils fault and the second was a wheel nose wheel steering fault that was done very quickly followed by the primary flight display on the captain's side blinking just momentarily the crew went through the ecam information and associated actions and nothing else really happened on the flight until they selected the gear down on final now they received a third ecam warning which was landing gear shock absorber fault and the crew had an idea what this might be they asked the tower that instead of landing if they could do a flyby of the tower which they did and the tower controllers observed the aircraft and said that yeah indeed the nose gear is tilted 90 degrees to the side the crew went through the guidance they had for this event and they did a successful landing on their second attempt in this case when the investigator started looking at it they found that there were several different independent fault that had led to this outcome there was indication of a momentarily interruption in the power supply to the bscu which had caused the northwest steering to stop functioning and then on top of that they found evidence that one of the hydraulic actuators that actually does the steering had been incorrectly maintained and it had gotten stuck open so it was continuously providing pressure onto the nose wheel steering this together with the fact that there was a third problem with the landing gear selector indicator had caused the normal steering tests you know the one that i talked about in the first incident to not happen and because there was no steering test it also didn't feel that the nose gear was out of whack and the open cylinder could just continue to pressure the nose gear into that 90 degrees position as a result of this another ecam warning was connected to the landing gear selector position indicator so that the crew would be aware if there was a problem with this our old friend the bscu once again received a software update this time to make sure that if a self-test couldn't be performed for one reason or another the bsu would automatically center the nose gear prior to landing and on top of that there was some new crew procedures involved so that if the primary flight display on one of the displays would flicker they would have to do a specific procedure which would basically switch the generator so that the bsu that was operating at the time switched over to the standby bsu as a matter of safety and redundancy basically now the next two failures are even more strange and i'm going to tell you all about them after this short message from my sponsor i am so happy to have brilliant as a sponsor of this episode now brilliant is an absolutely fantastic online learning platform with hundreds of courses of things for example about fundamentals and mathematics physics but also these brain puzzles where you you have to kind of apply your knowledge and when you come across something that you don't really understand they will have a really good explanation for how to understand it so that you can build on that and solve more and more complex problems if this sounds interesting to you which i really hope that it does stand the 201st of you who clicks on the link below which is brilliant.org mentor now will get a whopping 20 of their premium one-year membership so go down and start learning today then in 2021 it was time again and this time the crew of the airbus a320 extended the landing gear and when they did so they received now very familiar ecam warnings landing gear shock absorber fault and wheel nose wheel steering fault when they received this warning the crew had an idea that maybe it would work if they would reset the anti-skid and nose wheel steering switch off and on like some other crews have done in previous examples as well now it needs to be emphasized here that that procedure is not described in any ecam warnings or in any flight crew training manual or curate checklist they executed the landing and once again the nose gear was stuck at 90 degrees when investigation started into this incident the investigators very quickly realized that this aircraft had come out of a maintenance sea check only three days prior to the event as part or after that sea check the aircraft had been thoroughly cleaned with power wash and when the investigators started looking at the nose gear they realized that two sensors that was there to measure the exact position of the nose wheel had water in them that water had stopped these sensors from working properly and that had allowed the nose gear to start moving inside of the wheel well bay prior to the extension of the gear because this angle was bigger than the tolerance of the bscu the warning was triggered but when the crew did the resetting of the system that unfortunately also caused a reset of the bscu which allowed the nose gear to be pushed even further out as a result from this investigation airbus just re-emphasized the already implemented rules which said that maintenance was not allowed to use power washing inside of the nose wheel well and also it really emphasized to the pilot that unless a procedure is described by a non-normal checklist or by ecam actions it shouldn't be done it's not something that the pilot should be trying to invent themselves the last and final example that i have before we get to the incident that happened in medellin last week is an airbus a320 that was allowed to dispatch with the nose wheel steering not functioning at all at the time this was allowed by the minimum equipment list which is the list that gives procedures for how we can dispatch with certain faults there was a note though in the mile saying that if you're going to dispatch with this fault you have to execute only small turns right you're not to make any large turns and the reason for that is that if you're making small turns the camber of the nose gear leg allows the nose gear to automatically go back towards the center position however if you make turns that are bigger than 25 degrees then the gear will automatically go to the extreme position to 90 degrees instead now the pilots who operated this flight initially followed the mel guidance very closely they made very soft and small turns using differential braking and differential trust but when they got to the end of the runway they had to make a very steep 180 degree turn to line up that caused the nose gear to go into the 90 degrees position the pilots did not notice this instead they started to the takeoff role and they actually took off with the north gear at 90 degrees how they didn't notice that i'm not sure but that's what happened after the departure the pilots then received similar fault messages as all of the other crews had received and they managed to get in and do a successful emergency landing and as a result of this incident airbus basically changed the procedures inside of the minimum equipment list to not allow dispatch with this fault so why am i telling you all of these stories then well i want to highlight to you that even though something might look like it is the exact same fault happening over and over and over again actually it turns out that it very rarely is in the aviation business we always investigate every single incident an accident that happens and we come up with rectifications we come up to ways to fix it so it shouldn't happen again now in the case with the airbus and its landing gear at 90 degrees it has happened many many times and it happened again last week in medellin we still don't know what the reason is for that but we can be fairly sure that it's not going to be the same reason that it happened in all of these examples that i just told you so what should the pilots do then if they're faced with a problem like this well the airbus pilots that i've been talking to have basically said the same thing which is that if you're on final report and you don't have much fuel with you and you extend the landing gear and you get this combination of ecam actions you're actually only really supposed to do the ecam actions and whatever information that the ecam has about this problem is what you should be doing so you should be able to just land with this fault it is not more dangerous than that if you choose to go around and you choose to do what some of these crews did to verify the position of the nose gear and maybe you have more time and more fuel with you there is a little bit of extra information given inside of the f-com which is the operations manual of the airline but the fcom doesn't actually give much more guidance it just says that there is a possibility that the nose gear might be set to 90 degrees off however there is a procedure inside of the quick reference handbook that tells you how to land with an abnormal landing gear position that procedure will tell you things like for example moving passengers towards the back of the aircraft to reduce your landing speed and it will tell you a lot more you need to depressurize the aircraft on short final you need to give a brave brace call you need to think about shutting the engines down just off the landing and a lot more points like this now it's really important to point out here that it also says in the beginning of that procedure that if you have any green light for all three gears it means that the gears are safe means that they're down so you're not supposed to use this checklist however i can definitely understand that pilots might want to go into this checklist because in our mind there's always a possibility that the nose gear is not going to be able to take the stresses and actually collapse and that is an unsafe landing gear so i can understand that people might be following that checklist but it says specifically in the airbus manual not to follow that procedure if the gear is indicated down it is likely that that is going to answer some of the questions that you might have about the pictures and the videos that came out from this video that we're about to check out now so this video was shot by twitter user juan pada 7 thank you very much for letting me use this video so here we can see from inside of another aircraft and there is the latam airbus a320 now it's just landed a lot of sparks coming off the nose wheel which would be normal because the nose wheels have deflated and now it's grinding into the actual gear we can also see that there's no reverses being used it doesn't seem to be any spoilers deployed and then it eventually comes to a complete stop there so this looks like these pilots definitely went through the landing gear unsafe checklists because that would tell them to do exactly what we can see on this video which is no use of trust traverses no use of spoilers some other pictures that were shown on twitter in conjunction with this video also showed that the ram air turbine had been deployed and that will coincide with the pilots shutting down the engines just off the landing so why would you need to do that in case of an unsafe landing gear then well first of all when it comes to the spoilers if you have sufficient landing distance available you don't want to put them up and that's just because if you have a nose gear collapse for example well then there's a possibility that there might be some damage to the overall aircraft structure and you could you know find yourself in a situation where the spoilers are up and you can't get them down again and that's going to be a problem if you need to evacuate the aircraft over the wings secondary when it comes to the thrust reverses you don't want to use them because the trust reverses actually creates a little bit more pressure on the nose wheel but also because another part of the procedure tells you to shut down the engines as soon as you know that you've made a safe landing the reversers are not going to be any use anyway and the reason that you want to shut down the engines by the way is because if you have a nose gear collapse well then you don't want pieces of the nose gear or pieces from the front of the aircraft getting sucked into the engines potentially causing a fire so that's kind of the thinking behind that and that's likely why you could see that drum air turbine being extended as well guys i hope that you liked this explanation if you have more questions about this then file it into the comments here below now i want you to check out this video next which i think that you're going to find really interesting and i am going to have a meet up the first meet up since forever on the pilot expo in berlin on the 7th of may this year i'm gonna be there on the saturday and you can go into mentorpilot.com to claim your free admission tickets there so see you there i'm so looking forward to it [Music]

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 193,225

Keywords: Mentour Pilot, Mentour Pilot crash, Air crash investigation, seconds from disaster, Airbus a320, Jetblue flight 292, Jetblue 292, Nose gear, Nose gear collapse, Boeing, Boeing 737, Boeing 737MAX, fear of flying, fear of flying help, nervous flyer, Microsoft flightsim 2020, Airbus A380, How to become a pilot, pilot life, Mentour NOW, Mentour Pilot concorde, twisted nosegear, twisted nose gear, Nose gear fault, Runway emergency, Emergency landing, inflight emergency

Id: BBE4VNUyyjQ

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022