Comment by pants2 17 hours ago
Beautifully controlled landing, well done to the pilot.
This is certainly a dumb question, but could a plane like this land on a softer material to try to save the airframe? Like a dry lake bed, marsh, or golf course?
Not a dumb question at all, but incident management in aviation is all about saving the people on board first and foremost. Saving the airframe during an incident is considered a very distant bonus at the very best. No pilot ever got in trouble for sacrificing their plane to make the smoothest possible landing to protect the squishy meatbags on board.
Landing outside the bounds of an airfield brings a bunch of other unnecessary risks as well, like hitting trees, people, cars, buildings, etc. And as a sibling comment noted, airports have a TON of protocols for emergency landings in place, such as clearing existing traffic from the runways and sky, and having ambulances and fire trucks standing by so they can be at the aircraft literally seconds after it skids to a stop. Golf courses typically do not.
He protected one meatbag (himself) at the risk of an unknown number of other meatbags on the ground. They were right to fire him.
Context for others — https://www.postandcourier.com/news/special_reports/marine-f...
It's not really obvious to me whether he control over the plane such that he could have made a difference to whether the plane interacted with humans on the ground, or not.
> Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.
I don't think the article supports your conclusion definitively. Ultimately, we don't really know how controllable the aircraft was or how well instruments were working. (I'm sure the military has a somewhat better sense of this, but we don't have their unredacted internal reports.) In general it is very challenging to fly aircraft without instruments in cloudy conditions, and the risk is particularly high low to the ground.
Usually, breaking the plane apart means the people on board will also be much worse off.
Concrete is smooth and flat. Emergency services have easy access. If you land at a shallow enough angle, you’re just scraping. Given how many planes there are in the air, gear up landings on a runway are well understood.
Plowing the plane into a soft, uneven surface is far less predictable. You never know if you’re going to hit a stump or large rock hidden by grass.
It doesn’t make sense trying to save the air frame if you’re going to risk destroying it and killing the pilot in the process.
Not softer, because that'll make it lawn dart, but dry lake beds yes.
Edward's AFB is located at the edge of a dry lake bed exactly because it acts as a huge extended runway in case an aircraft under testing has problems landing and coming to a stop.
A more typical question would be whether landing on water would be a better idea. The answer is always no — it is always better for an aircraft to land at an airport. Always.
The most core reason is that airports are designed for airplanes to land on them. Everything else follows from that. But, concretely:
1. Most airports you'd be landing on have dedicated emergency firefighters already on site who are extensively trained for exactly this sort of an event, so they'll be on top of your plane within minutes of touchdown.
2. The runway is appropriately large, with enough clearance in all three dimensions to accommodate malfunctioning aircraft.
3. In an emergency, you want to normalize the situation as much as possible, so that the only non-normal factor is the one you're dealing with — here it's the lack of gear. It's much easier to do a normal landing and deal with one issue than to do a completely abnormal landing.
4. Concerns like fuel economy or material damage are nice-to-have luxuries that we can afford during normal operations. The second anything non-normal happens, the one and only concern is saving lives. I assure you the pilot of this plane was exclusively focused on getting his passengers safely on the ground.
Softer material is easier for the a part of the plane to dig into the ground and then the plane will flip over.
Best example I could find: https://youtu.be/KEz-r3dpQdo