Burn off as much fuel as possible and the pilot will touchdown lightly like a feather and hold the nose wheel up. keep the wheel back as long as possible and let all the force of the landing rest on the back wheels. if that s what s wrong. now, if it s one of the two back wheels, that s a much tougher situation. that s harder. you have to kind of hold one side up from the other. hold one side up from the other? what exactly does that mean? you have to try to keep the it s incredibly difficult. when you land you have to at the last minute adjust so you touchdown on the wheel that you have on that one side. it s very that s difficult. the pilots are trained for the nose gear problem. it s a lot harder to do anything else. if you don t have the gear down and locked into position and all that it s tough. there s a lot of talks sometimes they stay foam the runways, i haven t seen any pictures that they ve done that here. if they have and i guess i would suspect it s a nose gear
Might be wrong with the landing gear. and then they may go around for a while and see if they can drop as much fuel as possible because if it is a landing gear problem what you want to do is you want to land as light as possible on the longest runway possible. if it s a nose gear problem we saw this a few years ago in los angeles with that jetblue plane where the nose gear was actually turned. we re not speculating because we simply do not know what s wrong with the landing gear, but that plane dropped all its fuel, flewing if hours and touched flew for fours for hours and touched down very gently. very tricky to land those things. we re still waiting to find out exactly what s wrong with this plane, but it is a virgin atlantic flight 43 from gatwick and when we get live picture, we ll bring these to you. leah: we are also seeing reports from the telegraph that it may have been its right wing landing gear that failed to come down, and that presents a different
Waiting, just sitting in my chair going what is going on? just talk to the people out there, tell them what you re doing and i m sure the pilots are in good communication with those passengers because it s a fearful time if you only have three pieces of landing gear. we don t know whether it s main gear or nose gear that has the problem. main gear if both of them are down we have a nose gear problem the plane will land and slide on the nose but it s better to have two of the main gear down than only have one main gear down and the nose because all of a sudden that s not a good landing. and i m sure there are emergency vehicles all along that runway, right, max, waiting for this plane to land? sussex fire and rescue have said that they ve been braced for this and they ve got all of their emergency services on the scene on standby. they say that s the standard procedure when there is a non-standard landing. so not too much to read into that at this point but they re braced for this n
Problem or maybe even a door problem. so how much fuel do they have to burn off? does it have to be nearly empty before the plane lands? ideally, yes. because they want to get it as light as possible because if it touches down and it s heavy, you know, they don t have as many options to have a very light landing, to hold that nose gear up as long as possible. and then also you have much more fuel at a site for example, if the tank would come open if you d have a tear in the tank and sparking you would have a much worse situation than if you have empty fuel tanks. so if they had only gotten four hours into the flight you have to carry enough fuel to your destination, which is across the atlantic plus enough fuel to your alternative safety reserve airport, plus another 30 minutes beyond that. so they had a fair amount of fuel on board that plane and they obviously have to burn a lot off. i think, mary, that is the plane so i m assuming the plane
Believe? earliest reports said he knew he had a problem but i don t think he did. if he had he would have flown by as they did with jetblue eight years ago in los angeles and they would have him look at the landing gear. i don t think that happened. bill: in other words you circle the runway, you get a chance for tower to get a close look at you, and tell you what they see, is that what you re saying? right, that s what i think. also think about the injuries, bill. because we ve got eight people injured but i don t know whether they were injured in the aircraft itself or probably trying to use the escape out of the airplane. bill: that is an interesting point because sometime that happens. you mentioned this jetblue deal in l.a. eight years ago? why? what was the outcome of that, doctor? for one thing it was an a-320 instead of a 737. southwest has almost exclusively 737 aircraft. these were a-320 with a nose gear problem. i have not heard of one since