very thing. is that the plane? i don t think okay. okay. does not look like a lear jet to me. you re correct. the plane landed. that s not the aircraft that we have been focusing a great amount of attention on but it s landed. at this airport lambert international airport. jim, if everything is okay then once again your expertise and knowledge of the aviation industry paid off in gold for us as you said that this would probably play out this way. so again, this is video from near the airport. the helicopter for ksdk getting there on the scene but at least right now we re being told that this learwith at least eight people landed i don t want to say safely. i don t know the details and from looking at the screen we can t tell you much there but we re told it s landed, tom. that s the limited amount of information because that could have been a rough landing. we don t know the details.
we saw some emergency vehicles there, fire trucks, ambulances, all crews on the scene there. does this, tom, boil down to the pilot s expertise here? oh, absolutely. i mean, and this is where a pilot s skill is put to the test and in fact, jim and i have talked for the better part of eight or nine years now on emergency situations and, jim, i suspect that in your career you yourself have had to put a plane down with a potential problem with the nose gear. how do you do it? well, unfortunately, when i was doing this, i was still in training, believe it or not, and flying an aircraft that didn t have passengers abore. didn t have that pressure. but the technique for a tricycle landing gear is land as you usually do on the main gear. those two wheels in aft. and you gently, very carefully, lower the nose.
airport? oh, yeah. absolutely. standard practice. there s reporting that, in fact, the plane has done a fly by and the airport confirmed that there seems to be a problem with landing gear. absolutely. that would be standard practice. these airport fire departments are extremely well trained in how to handle any sort of emergency. usually called the red team or the red commander that just means how they designate airport fire units and the commander in immediate communication with the tower and would say, all right, we need to now shut down air traffic until we get the emergency resolved. you don t want a situation of another private pilot or a commercial plane in any way distracting this pilot as he or she comes in. either because they re on a taxiway or out on the ramp and trying to push everybody aside to give as much space as they can to this pilot. by the way, that s not the plane. right. i was about to point out that
here roughly about 17 minutes ago, what kind of time line are we looking at here? i would have thought he could have made the airport and could have already and literally trying to ascertain what the situation is and buying himself time and depends on how much fuel they have on board. let s remember, you know, one of the most famous cases involving of a plane where the front landing gear was twisted, that, of course, being the jetblue airbus flight. six, seven years ago now. coming in to a landing in california and you may recall that the front landing gear was twisted and you could see the tire pointed completely the wrong direction and you can imagine the force, the torque on that front landing gear when it made that landing on the runway and yet it held and with the full airbus full of people watching it live on their video. their live television screens. i remember that. i recall that greatly. the plane held up very well.
costello. thank you for coming in on this. we have this leer jet believed to be carrying about eight people and as we have reported time and time again on these sich weigh situation, they have a landing gear problem. it s a leer jet 45 is what we re told and that means it s probably at least 15 or 20 years old at the oldest. not necessarily an old plane at all. it s used widely in corporate america and for those who travel by private plane, and what we are told is that there appears to be a landing gear trouble with the nose, with the nose gear. and so, the pilot is trying to ascertain how serious that situation is with the gear or the door to open up and allow the gear to come down. his or her challenge now is to determine whether that gear is solid enough to make that landing and put pressure on the nose gear and then come in for a landing. if it is not, if he or she determines it is not, that s