URAL A321: bird strike, both engines out and crash lands in corn field.

PukkaStukka

Mods, delete this thread if already covered.

URAL A321 crash lands after take off following bird strike takes out both engines. Incident seems similar to the "Sully in the Hudson" albeit in a corn field. All survived, no major injuries. Video footage available from inside the cabin during the event

http://avherald.com/h?article=4cb94927&opt=0

duskyjoe

I’m wondering did they not put the gear down and this may have saved the day?

PukkaStukka

duskyjoe wrote: »

I’m wondering did they not put the gear down and this may have saved the day?

Everyone walked away from a gear-up double engine out landing. I think the day was saved without the gear TBH

tricky D

duskyjoe wrote: »

I’m wondering did they not put the gear down and this may have saved the day?

Priorities: Aviate in very little time with engines spooling up and down as per videos in avh and with less than a minute to figure out what is happening and do some thing about it. Also avh comments suggest gear down isn't necessarily the best action due to structural damage risks. More important to shut down the engines before contact.

Locker10a

I think the crew earned their money on this flight! They also got very lucky with the terrain available to them

H3llR4iser

duskyjoe wrote: »

I’m wondering did they not put the gear down and this may have saved the day?

Some of the pilots in here will probably have a better answer (especially if it is established procedure), but going off a limb and from a purely engineering point of view, putting the gear down in a scenario where there is a hard landing on a rough surface presents two risks:

1- the gear, not designed to cope with the stress and loads, can and will collapse sending the aircraft on an unpredictable trajectory, possibly cartwheeling / flipping over and breaking apart;

2- And maybe most importantly, the gear might collapse vertically into the fuselage, breaking apart the fuel tanks in the wings / center and, even worse if possible, ending up directly in the cabin; Hard steel & titanium + squishy humans = pretty gruesome results. (EDIT: found it, it was the Tuskish Airlines 1951 crash - the whole flightcrew died due to the nose gear smashing through the cockpit upon landing in a field)

Roger_007

Is it not possible to devise a retractable grid or mesh which would protect the engine air intake from bird strikes in the few minutes after takeoff. I'm thinking of a dome or cone shaped grid extending forward from the engine nacelle which would deflect any solid body away from the engine but would not interfere unduly with the flow of air into the engines.
Just wondering...

tricky D

No. See https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=109517849

PukkaStukka

Why mesh won't work

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01401/box_planeEngine_1401314a.jpg

smurfjed

Some of the pilots in here will probably have a better answer

I believe that it was a pilot who asked the question.


@Duskyjoe, with the failure of both engines, what hydraulic source would be available, or would they have had time to use alternate methods?

vicwatson

PukkaStukka wrote: »

Mods, delete this thread if already covered.

URAL A321 crash lands after take off following bird strike takes out both engines. Incident seems similar to the "Sully in the Hudson" albeit in a corn field. All survived, no major injuries. Video footage available from inside the cabin during the event

http://avherald.com/h?article=4cb94927&opt=0

Pilots won’t get the same praise unfortunately. Russia.

Comhrá

vicwatson wrote: »

Pilots won’t get the same praise unfortunately. Russia.

Maybe not. The crew seem to be getting wide recognition for their endeavours.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/15/flock-birds-forces-russian-plane-emergency-landing-cornfield/

Russian media hailed as a national hero a pilot who successfully landed an Airbus A321 with over 200 people passengers in a corn field after the aircraft 's engines were shutdown by a flock of birds.

The incident drew immediate comparisons the 2009 landing of an Airbus A320 aircraft on the Hudson River by pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who saw his story fuel a late night talk show campaign and a movie starring Tom Hanks, called “Sully.”

The Russian Ministry of Health reported that 23 people sustained injuries during the landing, which was conducted with landing gear down and engines turned off. Videos on social media of the field show a lengthy divet in the landscape dug out by the plane when it hit the dirt.

“Those who know the captain that emergency landed the Airbus A321 in a corn field, Damir Yusupov, speak with one voice: this feat is absolutely in character,” the Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid said in their story on Thursday.

On Twitter, another tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda, posted a photo of Yusupov and wrote glowingly that “today he saved 233 when masterfully landing the plane without landing gear and a failed engine right on a corn field. Thank you, hero.”



State television called the manoeuvre “the miracle over Ramensk”.

The Kremlin said it will bestow state awards on two pilots. "We congratulate the hero pilots who saved people's lives," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The happy ending to what could have been another major Russian civilian airline disaster underscores an unsettling safety record hanging over the Russian airline industry. Though things have notably improved since the Soviet era, the statistics are bleak.

Russia has the worst air safety record in the former Soviet Union. A 2018 report by a regional air safety authority found that 42 of 58 crashes that year in former Soviet states took place in Russia. It also found that 75 per cent of those accidents could be attributed to pilot error



Pilot training in Russia has been under sharp scrutiny since a fiery crash landing of a Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in May that killed 41 people. Officials were quick to question decisions made by the pilot that may have exacerbated the crash.

Roger_007

We are assured by the aviation industry that jet engines are designed and tested for their ability to withstand bird strikes.
We are also assured that the likelyhood of all/both engines being taken out simultaneously is virtually negligible.
Obviously these assurances are based on false assumptions.

Cookiemunster

Roger_007 wrote: »

We are assured by the aviation industry that jet engines are designed and tested for their ability to withstand bird strikes.
We are also assured that the likelyhood of all/both engines being taken out simultaneously is virtually negligible.
Obviously these assurances are based on false assumptions.

Tens of millions of flights worldwide every year. How often does this happen? The Hudson incident was ten years ago. That's twice out of how many hundreds of millions of flights? The odds are negligible.

Cloudio9

vicwatson wrote: »

Pilots won’t get the same praise unfortunately. Russia.

To be fair, taking off from a NYC airport and planting it on a river in mid-Manhattan is a little more dramatic.

smurfjed

We are assured by the aviation industry that jet engines are designed and tested for their ability to withstand bird strikes.
We are also assured that the likelyhood of all/both engines being taken out simultaneously is virtually negligible.
Obviously these assurances are based on false assumptions.

The assumption is that the engine can withstand a birdstrike, not a bird strike my multiple birds, I read that there were seagull's, so bloody big birds.

H3llR4iser

smurfjed wrote: »

I believe that it was a pilot who asked the question.


@Duskyjoe, with the failure of both engines, what hydraulic source would be available, or would they have had time to use alternate methods?

:D:D


I replied as someone who only steered a real Cessna 172 a couple of times, but has some understanding of physics. I have no idea if there's a specific "rough surface landing" procedure or what it calls for; As an engineer sure, the problem where the wheels might not be able to come down using the hydraulics with the engines out is a real one, and can see how there'd be no time for a "gravity drop".



However, when I saw the plane had belly landed I immediately thought "smart move", as I figured a belly landing would allow the aircraft to skid further dissipating the energy slower and that landing gear would in the best case be useless as it'd collapse and shear off, at worst it could be pushed into the cabin killing someone in the process. It has happened before with Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 in 2009.



Then again, as I said, could be a completely random thing dictated by the "aviate, navigate, communicate" mantra.



Again, speaking as one of the guys who builds things...this is the second time a A32X manages a high profile crash landing in the last 10 years, fully laden with fuel and without breaking apart nor going ablaze. Plenty of recognition to the pilots, of course, they're the ones who ultimately pulled it off...but also to the Airbus engineers and technicians who clearly build these birds strong.

duskyjoe

smurfjed wrote: »

@Duskyjoe, with the failure of both engines, what hydraulic source would be available, or would they have had time to use alternate methods?

Don’t fly a321s no more so sketchy on the hydraulic architecture .... what I think may have happened is the engines didn’t totally shut down but just failed to produce thrust re fan blades damage so the engine hydraulic pumps would still have been fully pressurized giving the flight control surfaces full authority..... I have seen modern fan engines with the front fan section destroyed yet the core still turning over. I also have been subject to an engine lunching itself in the N2 section yet continued to operate until we shut it down when it seized then.

What happened yesterday was a miracle, for those that say it wasn’t a Sully event, I beg to differ. Both aircraft could have been smoking holes in the ground. I think if the gear was dropped it would have been carnage and they were blessed to have vast cornfields on their nose with no as such obstacles and mature foliage to cushion the impact.

Stovepipe

They could have dropped the RAT to provide additional electrical and hydraulic power. As far back as WW 2, the crews of combat aircraft were advised to land wheels up, because the possibility of the undercarriage digging and flipping the aircraft over were very real, because most runways were grass or gravel. there is no guarnatee that the landing gear will shear off cleanly and it brings the possibilty of spraying hydraulic fluid everywhere, which is highly flammable itself. So it's easier to belly-land and recover the hull later.

duskyjoe

If the engines Stovepipe were still turning as in supplying residual thrust , deploying the RAT wouldn’t have made a jot of a difference and was the last thing imo on the pilots minds as they wrestled with their fate .

Cloudio9

There's some mechanical noise in the video so sounds like the engines were running in some capacity.

Lustrum

smurfjed wrote: »

I believe that it was a pilot who asked the question.


@Duskyjoe, with the failure of both engines, what hydraulic source would be available, or would they have had time to use alternate methods?

If both AC BUS 1&2 are lost the RAT will deploy automatically, which will then power the blue hydraulic system. That would give them power to the rudder, both elevators and both ailerons. But as someone else said if the engine generators were still working, I'd guess the engine hydraulic pumps were also still powering the green and yellow systems, so they may have had control over all the flight surfaces.

One way or another, it's an amazing feat to have safely gotten everyone off the aircraft after losing thrust to both engines

HTCOne

Sully had 3 minutes to make his decision, this guy had less than 1. Bravo.

Dardania

H3llR4iser wrote: »

:D:D


I replied as someone who only steered a real Cessna 172 a couple of times, but has some understanding of physics. I have no idea if there's a specific "rough surface landing" procedure or what it calls for; As an engineer sure, the problem where the wheels might not be able to come down using the hydraulics with the engines out is a real one, and can see how there'd be no time for a "gravity drop".



However, when I saw the plane had belly landed I immediately thought "smart move", as I figured a belly landing would allow the aircraft to skid further dissipating the energy slower and that landing gear would in the best case be useless as it'd collapse and shear off, at worst it could be pushed into the cabin killing someone in the process. It has happened before with Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 in 2009.



Then again, as I said, could be a completely random thing dictated by the "aviate, navigate, communicate" mantra.



Again, speaking as one of the guys who builds things...this is the second time a A32X manages a high profile crash landing in the last 10 years, fully laden with fuel and without breaking apart nor going ablaze. Plenty of recognition to the pilots, of course, they're the ones who ultimately pulled it off...but also to the Airbus engineers and technicians who clearly build these birds strong.

Indeed - I remember reading a long time ago that on shorter sectors a 737 is superior to an A32x due to the 737 having a light structure, whereas the A32x has a heavier structure to accommodate more fuel. Wonder how a 737 would have fared in both cases...

The One Doctor

duskyjoe wrote: »

I’m wondering did they not put the gear down and this may have saved the day?

Gear could have dug in, been torn off and ruptured fuel tanks and hydraulics, kaboom. Engines are destroyed, must've been a very soft field.

Nijmegen

vicwatson wrote: »

Pilots won’t get the same praise unfortunately. Russia.

Not a Russian aircraft, is the essential difference.

Stovepipe

If it was a Russian aircraft, such as a Tu 154, they would drag it out of the field, wash it, change the broken parts, change the crew's underpants, give them a shot of vodka each and return it to service. Problem? What problem? Nothing to see here, move on........I'm kidding.

H3llR4iser

Stovepipe wrote: »

If it was a Russian aircraft, such as a Tu 154, they would drag it out of the field, wash it, change the broken parts, change the crew's underpants, give them a shot of vodka each and return it to service. Problem? What problem? Nothing to see here, move on........I'm kidding.

Actually...some Soviet-era designed airliners were equipped and certified for rough field operations; Maybe not a cornfield, but they could land and take off without a runway. IIRC the Tu-154 is one such aircrafts...so it's a joke only up to a point

Stovepipe

All Russian aircraft, up to about the IL-86 and Tu 204, were designed to operate off grass and other unhardened surfaces and ALL Soviet civil aircraft were required to double-job as military and civil aircraft, so that in the event of war, the Aeroflot fleet would be used to supplement the military airlift forces for trooping and moving military equipment and stores. Similarly, the entire rail network defaulted to the military for the same tasks and every civil truck in Soviet Russia was required to be made available to the military on demand. This was simple enough when virtually all civil trucks were the same as Army trucks. Russia still practices soft field operations on a scale the West doesn't.

martinsvi

The One Doctor wrote: »

Gear could have dug in, been torn off and ruptured fuel tanks and hydraulics, kaboom. Engines are destroyed, must've been a very soft field.

keep in mind that most modern jets, including A321 have engines sitting well below fuselage - IMHO I would rather prefer to take a chance with gear going into the tanks, as long as it takes out some of the initial energy out, instead of having a flaming hot engine being ripped off and pushed back into the tank

CiboC

Would the engines not be engineered to withstand that kind of impact, or sheer off in a (somewhat!) controlled fashion in those circumstances? The engine won't be 'red hot' if it has been shut down and had it's fuel supply cut?

It's not a wildly implausible scenario for a plane to have to make a belly landing on a hard surface, for example if part of the gear failed to deploy or if there was problem with the tyres on one gear strut, etc...?