Wing and a prayer

Opinion

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This article was published 14/09/2018 (2295 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Imagine you’re a student pilot and you’ve just taken off on your first solo flight when, out of the blue, one of the landing wheels falls off your small, single-engine plane.

That’s the terrifying situation 17-year-old Maggie Taraska found herself in last Sunday when she took off from Beverly Regional Airport in Massachusetts on a solo flight to Portland, Maine.

Just after taking off in her Piper Warrior, the teenager heard a strange, unnerving sound. Seconds later, the control tower called with alarming news: part of her landing gear had fallen off.

“I was scared and stressed, honestly,” Taraska recalled. “I felt my heart sink. I realized I was all alone and no one else can do this for me.”

Although it was her first solo flight, she wasn’t alone in the sense that, 10 minutes into the flight, Taraska heard the voice of her instructor, John Singleton, who had heard about what was happening while in another plane on the ground and raced to the control tower.

“I just reassured her, ‘You’re doing a great job. Keep flying it,’ until the emergency crews were in place,” Singleton told the Boston Globe. “Then I just told her to treat it like a regular landing as much as you can.”

About 40 minutes after she had taken off, Taraska landed the plane, which veered off the runway into grass and then onto a taxiway before coming to a stop in a grassy area.

It’s not the first time a courageous flyer has cheated death, as we see from today’s heart-stopping list of Five Pilots Who Made Miracle Landings:

5) The fateful flight: Flybe airline, Feb. 12, 2014

The miracle landing: It’s one thing to land a small plane when part of your landing gear falls off. It’s another thing entirely to land a passenger plane when — please excuse us while we activate the caps lock feature on our keyboard — YOUR ARM HAS JUST FALLEN OFF!

It was Feb. 12, 2014, when a pilot for the British budget airline Flybe briefly lost control of a flight after his artificial arm came loose during landing. The Dash 8 aircraft from Birmingham, with 47 passengers onboard, was approaching Belfast City Airport when the unnamed pilot’s prosthetic forearm suddenly became detached from a special clamp fitted to the plane’s yoke. According to news reports, shortly before beginning to land, the 46-year-old senior captain — described as one of the airline’s “most experienced and trusted pilots” — had checked that his prosthetic lower left arm was securely attached to the clamp he used to fly the aircraft.

A report from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch said the captain had disconnected the autopilot and was manually flying the aircraft. But when he performed a “flare manoeuvre” in which the nose of the plane is raised, “his prosthetic limb became detached from the yoke clamp, depriving him of control of the aircraft.” Which is when the horrified pilot quickly assessed the situation and briefly pondered alerting the co-pilot. “However, because the co-pilot would have had little time to assimilate the information necessary to take over in the challenging conditions, the commander concluded his best course of action was to move his right hand from the power lever to the yoke to regain control… He did this, but with power still applied, and possibly a gust, a normal touchdown was followed by a bounce, from which the aircraft landed heavily.”

No one was hurt, and the captain pledged to more careful about checking the attachment and briefing his co-pilots.

4) The fateful flight: British Airways Flight 009

The miracle landing: It was June 24, 1982, when Capt. Eric Moody, at the controls of British Airways Flight 009, piloting 263 passengers from England to New Zealand, delivered the most understated in-flight message of all time.

After ordering his first officer to send a Mayday call, Moody famously took to the Boeing 747’s intercom and calmly said: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”

He wasn’t kidding. It was supposed to be an uneventful flight, but things took a nightmarish turn when the crew noticed excessive smoke in the air, although their radar showed a clear sky. Although they didn’t know it at the time, the plane had flown into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung about 180 kilometres southeast of Jakarta, Indonesia. As sulphuric smoke filled the plane and the temperature soared, the plane’s four engines caught fire and failed one after the other. The jet began drifting down towards the Indian Ocean.

According to the Daily Mail newspaper: “Moody took drastic action: to prevent his passengers dying of oxygen starvation, he went into a nosedive, dropping 6,000 feet in one minute, to an altitude where there was enough oxygen in the outside atmosphere to fill the cabin once more. And quite unexpectedly, this action almost certainly saved the lives of every person on board.” In executing the nosedive, the captain blew out the volcanic ash that had choked the engines, returning three of them to life and allowing him to manoeuvre the crippled aircraft to an airstrip in Jakarta. It is widely considered one of the most remarkable emergency landings in aviation history. Back on the ground, passengers hugged and applauded the heroic crew.

“The airplane seemed to kiss the earth,” Moody later said of the miracle landing. “It was beautiful.”

3) The fateful flight: The Piggyback Ansons

The miracle landing: It is arguably the most infamous, albeit strange, mid-air collision in history. It was Sept. 29, 1940, and two Avro Anson aircraft — a common British Commonwealth trainer during the Second World War — were on a training mission in the cloudless skies over New South Wales, Australia.

The planes were at an altitude of 300 metres when they made a banking turn and the pilot in the upper Anson, Leonard Fuller, reportedly lost sight of the lower Anson, flown by Jack Hewson, and the aircraft pancaked together, one locked atop the other. “Yet not only did they collide, they did so gently enough, while flying in exactly the same direction at the same altitude, that they created a large, four-engine biplane — forever to be known in Oz as the ‘Piggyback Ansons,’” according to the website historynet.com. This mid-air mating was facilitated by the fact the Ansons had clumsy, hand-cranked landing gear that took 140 turns to raise or lower, and the pilots had left the gear down.

“This meant that Fuller’s airplane essentially straddled Hewson’s, its wheels sitting atop Hewson’s wings,” historynet.com recalls. Both of the upper aircraft’s engines were knocked out, but those of the lower plane kept churning at full power. Hewson was able to crawl out of the shattered cockpit and parachute to safety, while Fuller discovered he could fly the conjoined craft — “It flew like a brick,” he later said.

Fuller could have jumped, too, but feared the tandem planes might crash into the town of Brocklesby below, so he decided to attempt a belly landing in a field. “He turned into wind over a stubble field and brought his charges to ground so gently that the upper Anson, with minor repairs, flew on until the end of the war.

At a time when good news was hard to come by, the story of Leonard Fuller’s daring feat, accompanied by spectacular photos, was the talk of the nation,” the Australian Broadcasting Corp. chirps.

2) The fateful flight: US Airways Flight 1549 (Miracle on the Hudson)

The miracle landing: As forced landings go, they don’t get much more dramatic than the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson.”

On Jan. 15, 2009, Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York for Charlotte, N.C. Less than 20 minutes later, the Airbus A320 carrying 155 people had miraculously landed on the Hudson River. Shortly after takeoff, the jet struck a flock of Canada geese, killing power to its engines.

Captain Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger, 57, a former fighter pilot, initially thought he could return to LaGuardia, but quickly abandoned that plan. He was given permission to try for a runway in New Jersey, but told controllers: “We can’t do it… We’re gonna be in the Hudson.” After passing a mere 270 metres above the George Washington Bridge, Sullenberger, also a glider pilot and expert in aviation safety, warned crew to “brace for impact” and guided the aircraft to a fairly gentle ditching in the Hudson off Midtown Manhattan.

“Almost everything about this famed emergency landing is miraculous, from the cause of dual engine failure (Canadian geese ingested by both engines) to the almost graceful impact on the Hudson River. Captain Chesley B. (Sully) Sullenberger has been granted hero status by everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Laura and George Bush,” according to travelandleisure.com. It was declared by the National Transportation Safety Board to be the most successful ditching in aviation history. On the water, Sullenberger gave the evacuate command and the crew began to remove the passengers, including one in a wheelchair, onto the plane’s wings through the four mid-cabin emergency exits as the plane slowly took on water. Nearby boats ferried everyone to safety, though five people had serious injuries, including a flight attendant with a lacerated leg.

No lives were lost, thanks to a calm, heroic pilot who was later immortalized by Tom Hanks in the 2016 drama Sully.

1) The fateful flight: Air Canada Flight 143 (The Gimli Glider)

The miracle landing: What with being a proud Manitoban, we feel fully justified in landing the legendary Gimli Glider in the No. 1 spot in today’s historic list. It was 35 years ago — July 23, 1983 — and the pilots of Air Canada Flight 143, with 69 people on board, were flying from Montreal to Edmonton when they heard an unnerving sound. “There was a loud bong and the cockpit (and) the flight deck simply went black,” pilot Bob Pearson, captain of the famed flight, has said. “We (were) a great big glider.”

The loud “bong” indicated both engines on the Air Canada 767, flying at 41,000 feet, were out of fuel. A later investigation found the ground crew had calculated the fuel in pounds instead of kilograms when the plane was fuelled, and the pilots approved the mistaken amount. A broken computer system in the plane didn’t detect the mistake. It meant the plane only had half the fuel it needed to get to Edmonton when it took off.

The good news was Pearson was a glider pilot, and he began gliding the commercial jet toward Winnipeg. Even better, first officer Maurice Quintal had once served at the former air base in Gimli, and he suggested landing there after calculating they would not be able to glide as far as Winnipeg. What could have been one of the worst disasters in Canadian aviation history was narrowly averted when the two heroic pilots guided the powerless aircraft to a landing at the old military base.

“They said there was a 767 landing with no fuel and about 100 people on board and I turned and looked out the right-hand side of my window and the plane was ready to touch down,” Bob Munro, an RCMP sergeant at the time, told CTV. “The experience of these two pilots to bring that airplane in was nothing short of a miracle.”

What the pilots didn’t know was that the runway had been converted into a go-kart speedway and children were playing on the track. As it glided to a landing, three boys on bicycles pedalled out of the plane’s path. They didn’t hear it approaching because it was gliding without the roar of its engines. No one on board or on the ground was injured, and the pilots were later celebrated as national heroes.

Some pieces of the plane are on display at a Gimli museum, and a Hollywood film is expected to take flight on the big screen. Because you can never have too many miracles.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca