Plane landing. Watch the video.

https://www.startribune.com/dr...pologetic/573277671/

One of my early flight instructors told me if you ever decide to land on a road, land INTO oncoming traffic. That way, people see you coming and get out of the way. That is, if they can process what they are seeing fast enough.

Still the pilot managed to get into a pretty good gap between the cars.

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
One of my early flight instructors told me if you ever decide to land on a road, land INTO oncoming traffic. That way, people see you coming and get out of the way. That is, if they can process what they are seeing fast enough.

Still the pilot managed to get into a pretty good gap between the cars.

What kind of brakes would a plane like that have? If that plane had been another car suddenly materializing in that gap, with the differential speeds involved, I think it could have easily stopped without colliding with the SUV. I'm also thinking that unlike a car, if the plane braked too hard it would flip over.

The airplane is a Bellanca Viking.

(This picture is a "Super Viking" which the incident airplane may or may not have been)

A Bellanca Viking has "tricycle landing gear", that is, two main wheels on struts just aft of the center of gravity and a (steerable) nosewheel at the front of the airplane. During landing, when the pilot is a few feet off the ground, he or she gently pulls the nose up so the main wheels touch the ground first, then as the airplane slows down and the wing loses lift, the pilot gently lowers the nose until the nosewheel is on the ground. At some point (the point varies on the type of airplane), the pilot starts to apply the brakes.

On almost all airplanes, the brakes are on the main wheels and only the main wheels. If you stomp on the brakes, momentum will just push the nosewheel more firmly onto the ground.

Theoretically, if you still had enough airspeed for the wing to generate lift and you stomped on the brakes before the nosewheel is down or maybe within a second or two of nosewheel contact, and pushed the pitch forward abruptly, it might be possible to pitch the airplane nose down far enough that the wing will come back up and the airplane would be very difficult to control and might "groundloop", that is, the airplane spinning around the vertical axis or spinning laterally around one wheel. This is more commonly done by landing flat or with the nose down so the nosewheel contacts the ground before the main wheels, a bozo maneuver called "wheelbarrowing".

Also, the main wheel brakes operate independently of each other. Very bad technique or a failure of the brake on one side can also cause a loss of directional control on the ground.

Some airplanes (at this point, only really old ones or some newer ones that have been modified) have two main wheels slightly forward of the center of gravity and a third wheel on the tail (on a swivel). Like this here Piper Cub:


The brakes are still on the main wheels, so it's a lot easier to pitch the airplane over during landing since there is no nosewheel to stop the nose-down movement. Tailwheel airplanes also also much easier to groundloop, especially in a strong crosswind.
A groundloop in progress... it's really bad when a wing touches the ground:


By the way, on most tailwheel airplanes, the tailwheel is steerable. On some really old ones it isn't, and on the ground (after the airspeed is too low for the rudder to be effective) you can only control the direction of the airplane by applying the brakes on one wheel at a time. Add to this that on a tailwheel airplane, the airplane sits markedly nose-up on the ground, so forward visibility is poor. You try to steer the airplane from side to side so you can see where you are going without driving off into the dirt.


I watched the video a couple of times. I appears the pilot landed well, but steered off to the left to avoid the SUV, but then the wingtip or the tail made contact with the median barrier (there's a bit of a spark at that moment, so metal hit cement), bounced off the barrier and hit the driver's side of the SUV. From the video, it does look like he landed pretty fast. The article doesn't explain why he landed on the freeway... out of gas or a mechanical failure, or what, but he matched the speed of the traffic at touchdown. The normal landing speed of a Bellanca Viking is ... get this ... about 66 MPH (57 knots), which is about what the cars would have been doing. (My airplanes landed noticeably slower, about 49 knots.)

Thanks, pj. Great info.

ABC News showed the clip this morning and I believe they said the plan had engine failure.

Local police report states:

quote:

A single engine Bellanca Viking plane made a suspected emergency landing on a Twin Cities freeway this evening

I read elsewhere that the pilot is not answering questions before the various agencies complete their investigations.

I am happy to answer many of your aviation questions.

I know a heck of a lot about airplane toilets.

quote:

The brakes are still on the main wheels, so it's a lot easier to pitch the airplane over during landing since there is no nosewheel to stop the nose-down movement. Tailwheel airplanes also also much easier to groundloop, especially in a strong crosswind.

Yes, I wasn't able to see if the plane had a nose wheel or tail wheel.