Thanks for this - I was wondering if it was even feasible to belly land a larger aircraft succesfully - the Jeju barely seemed to slow down once on the ground and I wondered if in this situation a water landing or even on the airport "lawn" was a safer option without landing gear.
Yes, good question. But, we don’t know if they went around before the strike or after.
There aren’t many examples of large passenger aircraft doing gear up landings. Apart from this, there’s only two that I can think of, a DHL 757 and the LOT 767. In both cases they had flap, and so were much slower. But they also used up a lot of runway. Far more than you’d expect. And this aircraft was much, much faster….
And the CVR and FDR apparently stopped recording 4 min before crash.
The FDR was sent to Boeing
It’s a very telling bit of information. Power to the recorders will be drawn from a couple of the aircraft buses (not the same one for each recorder), and it will stop any recording if that bus is unpowered. The buses themselves are powered by the engine driven generators, and the APU. The aircraft battery will be on a separate and very limited system, and powers only what is considered absolutely necessary, and recorders aren’t. I haven’t looked at it to any great extent, but apparently aircraft built after 2010 have to adhere to a new requirement for a form of battery backup to the FDR, but this aircraft was built before then, and in any event, it’s just as likely to have been grandfathered out. This isn’t a simple panacea though, as it’s all well and good having a recorder that has power…you then have to ensure power to all of the systems that it’s trying to record.
Actually I think it went to the NTSB. And Boeing don’t make flight recorders, so if you want to get the maker involved, it would probably be someone like Honeywell.
I think you can be pretty confident that there would be no tampering.
Why do you need a fire? Actually engines will often run perfectly well whilst on fire, and more than likely well beyond 4 minutes. The flash of flame that’s often seen with bird strikes is simply a compressor stall. For want of a better description, it’s the jet engine version of a backfire. Jet engines, when running, are always on fire. It’s just that normally you can’t see it.
I was thinking of an unrelated fire somewhere on the aircraft which may have been propagating rapidly and required an expedited landing. The low odds of a fire at any time do not further decrease because some other event is happening.
Why? You don't think a double engine shutdown/failure would hurry them up enough. You could get smoke in the cabin (from your cooked birds) but that's not a fire, and requires no more response than you'd already be doing. And you'd never get to that checklist (or even answer the phone) anyway.
From what I understand of it, very few COUNTRIES have the ability to read them (Oz is one), so I think that makes it pretty unlikely that people could either write on them or erase them. Aircraft are often also fitted with what are called QARs. Quick Access Recorders. That's a company thing, and they can be read by them. But, they rarely survive events, as they are not damage protected.
Australia is a minnow, so if it came out with something that wasn’t already required elsewhere, we simply wouldn’t be getting new aircraft.
Makes sense! Yes I guess it is the CVR I was mainly interested in. That would at least have provided some insights.
