Not an expert, but will attempt.
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Originally Posted by SS80 A few questions that someone from airlines/ prior experience can answer.
1. Why did the landing gear collapse/breakaway? Could it be the first point of contact with the smaller aircraft? |
I think the landing gear is designed this way. The gear is mainly designed to handle vertical loads. A collision like this will create very high horizontal loads. To prevent these loads from damaging the fuselage of the aircraft, its designed to breakaway. Clearly it worked as the fuselage remained intact as it slid down the runway. It burnt down later. If the gear wasn't designed to break off, the impact forces would have broken the fuselage which would lead to a much more catastrophic scenario.
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Originally Posted by SS80 2. Those escape shoots in the front have a lower gradient to slide since the landing gear has collapsed. Surprised to see 100% evacuation despite this issue. |
Not really an issue. While sliding down is faster, but passengers can even half slide, half crawl/scamper down.
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Originally Posted by SS80 3. In the videos there is some white liquid dropping off the fuselage and onto the floor and the engine for some reason seems to be spinning. |
Aircrafts carry various sorts of fluids (fuel/hydraulic fluid/water etc). It could be any one of them.
The engine could not be shut down. Most likely due to damage of related components.
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Originally Posted by SS80 4. Since the A350 will be in a Nose high and tail-down position(not sure of the exact technical name) at the time of landing, they won't be able to see directly what's beneath their nose, won't a proper camera with night vision help pilots in this case? |
Thats the flare maneuver. Its not that high nose up enough to block the view.
A camera system would add further complexity (and associated installation and maintenance cost) to a already complex phase of flight. And it would probably be of limited use. Aircrafts already have enough navigation lights as it is to be seen.
The only commercial aircraft in history which had problems with visibility during the landing flare was the Concorde. And it was equipped with a mechanism to tilt the nose cone down while landing to improve the visibility.
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Originally Posted by govindremesh Quoting from this link, it seems that the Dash-8 was on the runway for 50 seconds before impact. This is what I assumed, as pilots usually check the runway for arriving aircrafts before they enter to line up and wait. Additionally , the surviving captain of Dash-8 mentions that they had takeoff clearance.
It's strange that the A350 pilots did not see the aircraft on the runway. Might be due to visibility problems. Even stranger that the runway incursion alert system did not trigger despite Haneda having a surface movement radar |
Thanks for the link. Yes 50sec is a very long time. There are various systems in place to alert other pilots/ATC such as the Surface Movement Radar and the navigation lights on the aircraft itself. ATC should've been able to notice the Coast Guard aircraft moving on to the runway. The landing pilots should've been able to see the navigation lights of the Coast Guard aircraft.
The ATC transcripts released indicate that the CG aircraft was not given takeoff clearance and was only instructed to hold short.
We have to wait for the investigation report to understand. As with most aviation accidents, it looks like a combination of several factors.
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Originally Posted by bsdbsd In the days where general public can track where all the flights are, this one seems like an rather odd omission in terms of visibility. Another contributing factor could be the ADS-B of Dash8 was INOP. Its high time a FR24 like screen are introduced in the cockpit to suplement the vision of pilots, and ensure all vehicles that move are equipped with ADS-B transponders. |
Agree that runway incursions have become some of the most common incidents in recent times
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/airp...ry?id=97358077
But not sure what problem would having an additional display with all aircraft positions solve. This will only add clutter. The pilot of a landing aircraft only needs to know if the active runway is clear. The ATC of most large international airports (including Tokyo Haneda) have a Surface movement radar displays and can see exactly where all the aircrafts/ground vehicles are on the airport.
This is irrespective of whether they have ADSB-B transponders.
So there are already systems in place. We have to wait for the investigation to understand what actually went wrong.