Recognizing that a crash landing is no one’s idea of “traveling better,” but simultaneously admitting that when the going gets rough, surviving a landing might just be the best you can hope for, I give you this incredible photo of an Air New Zealand commuter flight, operated by Eagle Air, making an emergency landing at Blenheim Airport.
The plane’s landing gear failed to emerge from its bay. Pilots jockeyed the plane, a 19-passenger Beech 1900D with 15 passengers and 2 pilots on board, right down the center of the runway. Other than a damaged plane, whose fuselage was scraped down the runway, and which clearly needs new rudders on its propellers, no one was hurt. Amazing, especially when you see those hunks of spinning metal flying through the air. Great piloting.
RSS (FeedBurner)
Read with Amazon Kindle
Subscribe by E-mail
Follow on Twitter
June 19th, 2007 at 12:23 am
June 19th, 2007 at 12:28 am
Lets try that again:
Video (poor quality)
Post-landing passenger interviews
June 19th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
It looks strangely less dramatic in the video, but that smooth, straight landing is all the more impressive when you know the damage that’s being done (and that’s visible in the close-up).
Thanks for sharing, Errol!
June 24th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I would think that when landing with no gear engines should be turned off to minimize demege to both engines. It looks as if pilot kept them running ?
June 30th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Just to help shed some light, Live in Blenheim and witnessed what happened. The engines were off at the last minute, but the pitch wasn’t set to 0% hence the reason they were spinning on impact, and the 1900 landed on the Left grass runway then it slid onto the tarmac runway. The plane will be out of action for about 3 months and the cause was because of a cracked hydraulic actuator in the extension/retraction system for the landing gear.
July 1st, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Even with the impressive landing, this does little to help ease my fears of flying! I can’t imagine being a passenger on a flight like this. Great job, Pilots!
September 8th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Betty as a former pilot, I can tell you they are just as keen to get home after a long day as you are. All pilots from their earliest training are trained for emergencies and devote a lot of conscious thought to safety and prevention.
You are more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash, honestly. When our time comes then it is sad but unavoidable.
Don’t let fear corrode your enjoyment of what is really a neat experience. How many hours have you actually spent worrying about flying and how much danger have you ever really been in flying ?
I bet the numbers don’t tally.