Footage of Fairford airshow: nosewheel collapse

[Guest]

Well, the site is Dutch and the video has Dutch narration, but you'll get the point. Go to:http://nu.nl/document?n=59828and click on "Bekijk video" (Realplayer required). Ouch! Luckily, there were no casualties.

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[Guest]

OMG! Was that dive part of the show or did he have problem and he tried to land quick?A perfect example of what happnes if you land or your nose gear first.Take careMike

[Guest jaapverduijn]

From both the written and spoken Dutch texts I conclude that the whole video sequence is part of an emergency landing, that must have been prompted by something that happened before the video started. Jaap Verduijn.

[ckukmale 30]

Well until you said that I thought maybe it was as part of the things that these kind of planes do at airshows was to show how a cargo, military transport plane do short landings, where they come in steep as you might have trees and steep terrain below and then do a quick stop and I just thought maybe it had messed up on the flare...it seem to bounce up again after the flare and the nosewheel seemed fine then but after the bump he made it land straight onto the nosewheel which made it collapse.Anyway it put a stop to the airshow for most of the day for what I heard about and they had to get other planes in from other airbases to do displays as the runway was closed.

[Guest jaapverduijn]

Considering that, according to the Dutch text, it was a emergency landing indeed and that those guys wanted to get down FAST, it's an impressive piece of flying. Plane probably isn't good for much anymore, but both pilots walked away unscathed! Holy cow, if you're coming down THAT steep and fast, you're more likely to finish up in the hot core of the earth or even resurface in China, than to flare out at exactly the right moment! Those pilots did a marvelous job, I think!