NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston

My uncle did a gear-up landing that way a number of years ago. He was fine, but the plane was a total loss from a financial perspective. It was a Moonie, and the prop hit the ground, which forced an engine rebuild as I understand it.

Scary, but as they say any landing you walk away from...

The article says it was a mechanical issue that forced the gear up landing?

Was it flying at the same time? Maybe your plane is visible in the WB-57's imagery?

There probably isn't much structural damage to the plane aside from the scraping/grinding on the bottom. Don't misunderstand, that's going to be bad damage - we aren't just talking about scratched paint. But it looks like the pilot set it down soft as a feather, they're definitely a pro.

Planes are so expensive that it's worth putting a lot of money into saving them. A replacement airframe comparable to the B-57 would probably cost $10 million, then you'd probably spend that much again to customize it for NASA mission. Even if they need to spend a couple million dollars fixing the WB-57 it beats the alternative.

Edit: It occurs to me that rather than use a different plane they'd probably reactivate another B-57 from the boneyard - but B-57's have been retired for > 50 years to restoring one would still be a significant project.

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

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.

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.

One consideration is accessibility for first responders once the aircraft touches down.

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.

That's an episode from "Thunderbirds".

Implementing a mobile landing platform for commercial or high-speed aircraft is a theoretically sound concept for emergency recovery or weight reduction but faces massive technical hurdles in precision, synchronization, and infrastructure.

Just make a huge baseball glove to catch the plane as it's approaching.

You’re after a fast aircraft carrier.

Ha ha, but seriously that couldn't possibly work with any significant crosswind.

Next project: interstellar jump craft

The plane will run out of fuel during step 1 or while on the way to an airport that has already completed step 1.

That seems like incredible overkill for a 1950s era bomber jet, no?

> Why is such an ancient plane still being used?

Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.

> Are they machining their own engine parts?

The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls aren't that frequent.

> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.

All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.

I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.

When I was in the Air Force in the early 1990s, we still used KC-135 "flying gas stations" that had been built during the cold war in the 1950s. While expensive to maintain they were far less expensive to fix than buying new and starting from scratch. With regular full maintenance checks in the hangars (wash them, inspect them with dental picks and flashlights, replace broken parts, etc.) we kept those planes in service and mission ready for decades.

There was an entire supply chain of every single part ready to go, with technical manuals for every maintenance task you can imagine. If we couldn't fix something, it would go to the jet lab or machinists or whatever.

The system in place is mind bogglingly good.

/edited for a typo.

The WB-57 can fly at high altitude (>60,000ft) for long time. The NASA U-2 can fly higher but is likely more limited operationally.

It's MUCH more expensive to design and build an aircraft from scratch than it is to repurpose and maintain an existing design that fits the requirements. The major cost sinks are not even the design and manufacturing, it's all of the testing, certification, training, documentation, maintenance planning, and so on.

Plus, it's very likely that this plane is not an ancient as you think. New airframes are more efficient aerodynamically, weigh less, and offer more capabilities but depending on the role, those may not be huge advantages. Nearly everything ELSE on a typical airplane can be upgraded to modern standards. I haven't checked Wikipedia, but I highly doubt NASA's WB-57s are still running the original 1953 engines and avionics, for example.

> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.

Everything that flies is expensive to maintain but the costs to maintain most older aircraft tends to be much lower than new ones, sometimes even if certain unavailable parts need to be rebuilt or fabricated. Part of the difference is newer designs tend to use advanced composites and manufacturing techniques which can yield increased performance and efficiency but are expensive and often require specialized techniques to service/replace.

The second factor is that funding, designing, validating and manufacturing new military aircraft platforms has grown astronomically expensive for a huge number of reasons.

Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. If you can fly the aircraft again, it's a great landing.

That's the smoothest landing I've ever seen including normal ones on landing gear.

As neutrally as possible, a gear up landing is suboptimal.

"high friction landing" :)

It probably did damage the runway a bit, but given that these ancient planes are no longer in production, the cost to repair whatever damage was done to the plane (looks pretty extensive, from the video) is likely much more expensive than whatever work is needed to fix the runway.

Seems like controlled landings on the belly with the help of airport fire fighting crews tend to work though.

I assume this is made possible by explicit system (aircraft + airport) design decisions agreed upon 50+ years ago.

Is that supposed to be a joke? The risk of a disastrous midair collision in that scenario is far worse than the risk of a gear-up landing.

How about a drone system that IS the wheels.

Great idea!

And if needed, to actually swap defective landing gear parts to whatever extent possible. Maybe difficult or impossible with current aircraft designs, but maybe future ones could be designed with this backup option. Maybe a secondary landing gear insertion point or something.

One of them was returned to service after 40 years in the boneyard in Arizona, back in 2011, I would expect they'll look at the other airframes there to see if they're suitable sources for a rebuild. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of this one though, it was already doing pretty well for a design that first flew in 1949 (the English Electric Canberra design that was then built by Martin)

It's a mid-50s bomber. The skin will be easy to replace. Drill out the rivets, rivet on new sheet metal. I don't think it even dragged the wingtips.

Might be some complications with the nose gear and the payload bay (the main gear is on the wings, and untouched) but nothing terribly complicated. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was designed with some assumption of belly landings; it's a warplane after all.

Repairs surely isn't automatic, and who knows how tight that's program's budget is, but planes are repaired from such landings all the time, and if they attach any value to the vehicle it can be repaired, and not at great cost.

It depends, but NASA has 2 more of these (currently under inspection, so not in flying condition). Given its importance, its most likely they will find a way to make it fly again.

That depends on a lot of factors. What is the damage, how much would it cost to repair, and is spending that much considered worthwhile by NASA or whoever owns it? (Or whoever buys it after this)

That paragraph had me snort.

Once you’re grinding along the runway, is there anything the pilot can do?

‘Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended. The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction.’

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