There are quite a lot of plane touchdown movies on the market that make for attention-grabbing viewing, however this must be one of many wildest that I’ve ever seen…
TAP Air Portugal Airbus A321 has surprising touchdown in Madeira
This incident occurred right this moment (Tuesday, March 26, 2024), and includes a four-year-old TAP Air Portugal Airbus A321neo with the license plate CS-TJQ. The plane was working a brief 36-mile repositioning flight inside Portugal, from Porto Santo (PXO) to Madeira (FNC). The flight took nicely underneath quarter-hour, and solely had a crew onboard, with out passengers.
Madeira is understood for being a difficult airport to land at, attributable to winds regularly being sturdy (and so they’ve been particularly sturdy in current days). It’s additionally a preferred airport with airplane spotters, provided that there are regularly some “attention-grabbing” landings.
Properly, this explicit flight had what may simply be probably the most weird touchdown ever captured on video on the airport. Give it a look ahead to your self under.
There appear to be two main elements at play:
- It’s clearly very windy in the course of the method, as you may see the variety of corrections the pilots are making because the airplane approaches the runway
- The airplane can also be in all probability at its lightest attainable weight, provided that there are not any passengers or luggage onboard, which may influence flying efficiency
As you’ll see within the video, the airplane mainly simply floats above the bottom, and refuses to land. That’s regardless of the airplane being at a reasonably steep nostril down angle. Finally — simply wanting the midway level of the runway — the airplane touches down, with the nostril gear touching down first (by a protracted shot).
Not surprisingly, the airplane had no points coming to a cease as soon as it did contact down, although I think about a gear inspection will have to be carried out earlier than this airplane can reenter service.
What had been the TAP Air Portugal pilots considering?
That is past my space of experience, so I’m curious if any business pilots can fill us in on what precisely was occurring right here. Right me if I’m incorrect, however I don’t assume there are any form of conditions (other than an emergency) the place working procedures permit for touching down with the nostril gear first.
On this case, it’s not like there was a sudden downdraft, and the pilots weren’t anticipating the nostril wheel would hit first. Quite, that they had the airplane’s nostril angled down your entire method down the runway, so absolutely they knew this was the way it was going to play out.
Did the pilots actually deliberately contact down this manner, reasonably than performing a go round? And in that case, was it simply because they had been impatient, or is there any affordable rationalization for one thing like this (aside from blaming it on DEI)?
Backside line
A TAP Air Portugal Airbus A321neo had fairly a memorable touchdown in Madeira right this moment, because the jet touched down with its nostril gear first. What makes this so unusual is that the airplane was angled nostril down your entire method down the runway, so presumably the pilots knew it was going to occur, and had been high quality with it.
Clearly the situations right here had been difficult — you had sturdy winds mixed with a really mild plane — however nonetheless, that doesn’t clarify this sort of a touchdown.
What do you make of this TAP Air Portugal A321neo touchdown?
