technical experts for that plane talking through the emergency now, this occurred shortly after takeoff, from what we re understand and the telegraph is reporting that the issue is with the right wing landing gear. now, we have not been able to confirm that at this point but that does present a pretty dynamic issue if it s one landing gear on either side that s not coming down. that can create a pretty big challenge for a pilot as they re coming in to land. we have dr. alan diehl who s a former ntsb investigator who s with us. doctor can you talk a little bit about what you ve seen in the past in your experience with aircraft that have landing gear emergencies and how they re handled in this type of scenario? well, leah, you re absolutely right, it appears, the evidence is that this happened shortly after takeoff. so it s probably when the landing gears were being retracted. as i mentioned remember, there are four main landing gears plus
probably the right side drop to the pavement or grass perhaps if they re off the center line of the runway. leah: you mentioned getting as slow as possible, whether you re going to do a bell hi-up landing belly-up landing or if you re going to try to take it in with one gear up. you mentioned they might just try to do it that way, but, of course, there could be the belly-up landing approach as well. you also talked about wind and length of runway. tell us how they may select a particular runway to were better assist in the emergency landing. well, normally you try to land into the wind but if you know you re going to be touching down i m just hypothesizing this may be their approach we re going to touch down on the left main, they ll brief this thoroughly to the controllers and each other. we re going to touch down on the main gear, i m going to have to hold that left wing down, so we prefer wind from the left.
landing. taste trace that s a great point. let s bring in dr. alan diehl, we just talked to him and really the whole mantra here is you want this plane to be very light. sometimes, look, it can be a busted light that shows the landing gear is not dropping or the landing gear has failed, so you really never know in these scenarios. you have no idea if it really is locked true? absolutely. of and, of course, they re talking on the radio right now. i don t know if it s a boeing or an airbus, but they re talking to the engineers back at their maintenance base, they re troubleshooting everything. they don t like to dump fuel over cities so they re probably burning the fuel down the flight attendants are preparing the passengers. everything is going to be very care any approached. they ll look at wind direction length of runway, and my guess is they usually try to touch down on the good main landing gear and get as slow as they can to et let the, in this case
trace: it s a great point because a few years ago we saw a plane that came in, and the right landing gear was folded up and the plane had to land on that wing. it s very very tricky, and it s these types of things that you never get to do in a simulator leah: right. trace: because that s just not what you do. leah: right. and even in a simulator you can use these types of is scenarios, but you re not going to get the same feel, and the problem is you really a lot of times what the airplane feels like when you re coming in for a landing can contribute to the problem itself. you know, in this case they may end up deciding if that landing gear will not come down, they may decide that they re just going to bring the byer gear up and entire gear up and do a belly-up landing. sometimes that s a better scenario. in that case, you know, they would have firefighters on the scene, they would try to lower the fuel state as low as possible as trace mentioned and possibly put some sort of fir