JetBlue's Happy Ending; Should Airbus Be Worried

Last nite's video moment of the day was watching the JetBlue Flight 292, piloted by Captain Scott Burke, attempt to land with its front landing gear stuck in the wrong direction. Passengers were able to watch the events unfold on their DirecTV video screens. Someone even videotaped the entire episode with a camcorder. Other than sparks flying from the messed up landing gear, the landing was uneventful as the pilot managed to keep the plane on the centerline of the runway at LAX and everyone was safely deplaned through the front door.

I've always been a big fan of JetBlue, particularly because of those video screens, and because they had great prices. I guess we can add great pilots to the list of reasons to fly JetBlue. Oh, and in case anyone wonders, the name of the plane was Canyon Blue (JetBlue puts cute nicknames on every plane it owns - the first JetBlue flight I took was on the plane Bippity Boppity Blue).

The Airbus A320 is the plane that was involved in last night's incident.

Now, why did that landing gear fail, and is this part of some larger problem with Airbus aircraft? An Airbus A330 had rear landing gear problems back in 1994, and seems unrelated to this situation. However, The NYT reports that there was a prior incident with striking similarities to what happened last nite:

... according to the Web site of the National Transportation Safety Board, in 1999, an Airbus A320 operated by America West had a similar problem with its nose wheels rotated 90 degrees. In that incident, the two pilots of Flight 2811 from Newark were able to land the plane at the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, and the plane was evacuated.

The FAA will definitely be looking into this incident to determine why the landing gear did not retract properly. They will look at the maintenance records for the aircraft, as well as the mechanical and electrical systems that operate the landing gear.

UPDATE:
Airbus should be justifiably worried as it wasn't just one prior incident, but seven others (at least according to a news report I heard on TV - no verification on that total, but we do have at least one confirmed incident of front landing gear failure admitted by the company).

Also according to the same news report, JetBlue had done some kind of repairs to this plane's front landing gear just a day earlier. JetBlue, Airbus, and the FAA have each launched investigations to figure out why this happened.

JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin said the airline was investigating the incident with the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board. She declined to identify the pilot and first officer.

The cockpit voice recorder and digital flight data recorder — the so-called black boxes — were removed from the airplane and secured by the investigator in charge, the NTSB said Thursday.

And JetBlue dodged another bullet today, as another one of their planes ran into some mechanical difficulty. The plane had an indication that flaps were locked, but the pilot could not verify this. The plane landed normally and investigators will look into this as well.


Technorati: JetBlue, Jet Blue, airbus, A320, and Airbus A320.