Delta plane lands in North Carolina without front landing gear

On June 28, passengers aboard a Delta flight got off the plane using an inflatable slide instead of a ladder. The aircraft's nose landing gear failed to deploy when it landed at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, reports APNews.

Photo: IStock

An inflatable ladder was pushed up to the door of the plane, and firefighters helped passengers disembark.

“For the last 10 years I have been traveling for work. The first time I went down this slide is one of the coolest things in life,” said passenger Chris Skotarchak, who flew to his office in Charlotte from Buffalo, New York.

Skotarchak said that if he had not seen the plane without its nose gear down and been told to prepare for an emergency landing, he would have thought everything was fine.

“The pilot told us that we were going to land, that we would hear a big bang and a lot of grinding,” Skotarchak said. “But this landing was even smoother than usual.”

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Skotarchak was one of 96 passengers, two pilots and three flight attendants aboard a Boeing 717 that took off from Atlanta bound for Charlotte.

All passengers were taken to the terminal. The airport said it was working on removing the aircraft and reopening the runway.

“Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers,” Delta Air Lines said in a statement. “Although this is a rare occurrence, Delta flight crews train intensively to safely manage many scenarios.” Flight 1092 landed safely with no reported injuries."

The airline said it is now focused on helping clean up the aircraft and help passengers get to their final destination. She cooperates fully with investigations by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.

The solution

The problems began when the pilots received a message that the front landing gear had failed as the plane was approaching Charlotte Airport. Therefore, they flew past the control tower so that controllers could visually inspect the aircraft. The controllers saw that the wings of the nose landing gear were open, but the landing gear did not lower, and the pilots landed the plane without the nose landing gear.

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The crew calmly escorted the passengers to the emergency slides at the two exits after the emergency landing.

Less than four hours after landing, Skotarchak, a passenger from Buffalo, was at work, but only with his cell phone and a bottle of water. Passengers were asked to leave everything else on the plane as they made their way to the exit.

“I was going to buy a lottery ticket, but I can’t because my wallet and backpack were left on the plane,” Skotarchak said.

Skotarchak and his wife are leaving for a holiday in Europe next week, and he said his wife asked if he was afraid to fly again.

"I told her that it can't happen to the same person twice," Skotarchak said.

The people on the plane sat quietly during the landing with their heads down and their hands on the back of the seat in front of them.

Crew professionalism

Gregory A. Zahornaki, a former captain at a major airline and assistant professor of aviation at Embry-Riddle Aviation University, said such landing gear failures are "very rare" and that commercial airlines in the US have "fantastic" aircraft maintenance experience.

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Zahornacki said the crew did what they were supposed to do when the front landing gear didn't work properly, which was to extend the rest of the aircraft's undercarriage to absorb energy as the aircraft hit the runway.

"I'm confident they did everything physically and humanly possible to test and make sure they could deploy the landing gear," said Zahornaki, who flew the DC-9, the predecessor to the Boeing 717.

“This was the best potential outcome we could have expected in this situation,” he said. “I think the plane suffered minimal damage, which is secondary.” So I think the main takeaway here is that everything was done correctly and safely.”

Charlotte Douglas International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the United States, according to Airports Council International. It offers non-stop air travel to 178 destinations.

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