I have only vague memories of reading a story (or maybe it was seeing a movie) in which an airplane (maybe airliner, maybe military) suffered from a locked landing gear, and a small person on board was able to physically get down there and do something that unlocked the landing gear.
I don't know whether such a maneuver is possible in real life and cannot remember the name of the story (or movie). Ring a bell for anybody?
AFAIK, with modern airliners there is no way to leave the pressurized part of the hull to go into the unpressurized space where the retracted landing gear is stored.
BTW, there is no crawling space in the wings to reach the main landing gear if attached to the wings.
HM.
doesn't directly match but similar:
story scene where small airplane's landing gear won't fully engage. 2 wheels down but 3rd is stuck.
MC has maintenance assistant job (IIRC) at the airfield, and he is the only one physically small enough to have a chance to be lifted into the wheel well of the plane from the back of a pickup truck driving underneath it as it makes a low pass. He manages to free the stuck wheel but the sudden release drags him with the wheel and crushes him between the plane and the landing strut. He also takes a massive blow to the back of his head.
Scene is from Second Chance Too by Number 7
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IuEHvQHV5Pc
In the 80s there was an incident with stuck, partially retracted landing gear on a Piper. It was pulled down by a man standing in the sunroof of a speeding car going down the runway under the flying plane. Footage starts about three minutes in.
Something similar occurred in a episode of 'Scorpion', only as far as I remember it was a big plane and it was the Walter O'Brien character who fixed it from the back of a very fast car.
(Another example of a fictitious genius character - with a supposed IQ of 197 - failing to convince).
AJ
So you were talking about a stuck gear not a locked gear? If it's not fully engaged it is not locked.
My question is why you would want to take a chance unlocking a landing gear. They normally only lock in the down position and the procedure is to go around and land immediately.(obviously you would discover the gear locked when taking off and trying to raise the gear) The gear could possibly not lower completely but that is not locked. Many of the older planes had a handle that you pumped hydraulic fluid to get the gear down if they failed to go down.
"Jammed" probably describes the situation better than "locked".
I once read about a light plane that touched the runway after the gear started to retract. Something bent and it wouldn't go either up or down. A passenger, a guy with nerves of steel and much trust in his ropes, climbed out and unjammed it.
I once read about a light plane that touched the runway after the gear started to retract. Something bent and it wouldn't go either up or down. A passenger, a guy with nerves of steel and much trust in his ropes, climbed out and unjammed it.
The first part happens with sufficient frequency that I can remember a few in the past decade (most likely cause: faulty microcontroller working intermittently that we later learnt falsely reported the landing gear position). The second part you might be thinking about the early A320 nosegear turning sideway? I don't recall anything like the final part though.
no, not an A320. This was a light plane, and probably not newsworthy. I read about it in a column of cautionary tales by and for pilots. The pilot had accidentally put the gear lever in the up position before takeoff. The gear didn't try to retract while there was weight on the wheels, but did start to retract as soon as the plane lifted. And that turned out to be before the pilot was ready to keep it in the air, which sounds strange but not unprecedented.
I also have vague memories of something like that happening with a commercial flight, some time in the 1950s or the first half of the 60s. A movie would have been based on that incident.
I have only vague memories of reading a story (or maybe it was seeing a movie) in which an airplane (maybe airliner, maybe military) suffered from a locked landing gear, and a small person on board was able to physically get down there and do something that unlocked the landing gear.
I do not remember the name of the movie but there was a WWII movie where the returning bomber was shot up and the hydraulics were gone. The pilot had the crew manually lower and lock the landing gear in place by using hand pumps.
Here is a video of them showing how it was done in a B25 but it was pretty much the same or similar for the other B style bombers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqXuJWjmPI
I just am unable to remember the WWII movie as they needed to get the gear down because the belly gunner was trapped in his bubble under the plan due to the damage and the belly gunner would not survive a plane forced to land on its belly.
I remember being on a transatlantic flight in a 707, and after takeoff the pilot did not get the light confirming that the undercarriage was locked up successfully. Lowering and raising the wheels a few times did not clear the condition, so the plane had to dump tons of fuel (to avoid being too heavy to land safely), return to LHR, replace the faulty sensor, refuel and then set off again. If the wheels had come down while half way across, the changed aerodynamics would have meant there wasn't enough fuel left to reach land!
Perhaps this movie -
"Memphis Belle is a 1990 British-American war drama film."
"....Further battle damage destroys the plane's electric systems that power the landing gear, though the crew successfully deploy the gear manually just prior to landing. Back on friendly soil"
In December 1944, my father served on a B26. It got so much flak that the elevator and rudder had to operated by pulling on the cables by hand. The plane made it behind US lines and eventually landed in a field about 50 miles from Paris.
Apropos of nothing, Flak is the German word for anti-aircraft gun. FLug Abwehr Kanone (Flight defence cannon). I wonder how it came about that the Allies adopted the word.
Flak was introduced to the English language in World War II to refer to the anti-aircraft fire from anti-aircraft guns, from the German Flugabwehrkanone (Flak), for "aircraft defence cannon".Wikipedia
Flak Jackets came about then as well.
So we snagged it as a quick way of saying what was being shot at you. Much easier to say "flack" than "Anti-aircraft guns".
limab
I always understood it being called flak because the cannons would fire a projectile that would explode at a desired height that would produce a cloud of debris (flak) that would tear apart or shred the aircraft.
"Anti-aircraft guns".
They could be Uncle aircraft guns. What they fire is more like sperm than eggs. Aunts don't produce sperm.
Aunts don't produce sperm.
according to 3 of the programs on the news that is no longer a true statement. Will have to start following Crocodile Dundee way of checking for Sheilas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsmJxjfP9jo
If you read Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction, there was an alt-universe story on one of the BtVS fanfiction sites that had that. Strike a bell?
(Not sure how much I can say on here about other fiction sites.)