The aviation industry has such a wonderful safety record that people boarding an aircraft rarely, if ever, think about the possibility of an accident happening to them. Of course the same people will have driven down the highway to the airport similarly unaware that, statistically, they were in a much more dangerous place than on board their aircraft. This is as it should be of course.
But for those of us whose life is dedicated to aviation as pilots and air traffic controllers, incidents and accidents have a different meaning altogether. We train to handle them intellectually and emotionally and we do everything we can to prevent and avoid them. Nevertheless, on occasion things do go wrong and we are in danger of being reduced to mere spectators of the brute forces of physics.
But we fight back, to the last breath, the last instruction, the last pull on the control yoke and never give up. In many cases, this kind of resolve can actually beat the odds and we turn a potential catastrophe into an incident of little consequence.
We all have memories of cases where things had gone wrong. Some were more serious than others, in some friends and colleagues flew west into the sunshine never to return in others some escaped with their lives while others did not.
I will never forget the sight of the blackened vertical stabilizer of the IL-18 that flew into the ground in Budapest in bad weather or the voice of the navigator of a TU-134 who continued broadcasting a narrative of what they were experiencing on board as the stricken aircraft that had lost all instruments in near zero visibility slowly rolled to one side finally hitting the ground with its wingtip…
I was on duty when we got the AFTN messages that a Tu-154 of MALEV went missing over the Mediterranean and the message was brought to the duty supervisor by the tearful wife of the captain of that flight (she was one of the operators on duty in the AFTN centre). The IL-18 that went down while approaching Copenhagen in pouring rain, took off from Budapest while we were on duty in the tower.
Most of those accidents happened far away from our place of duty and the shock was also kind of remote… but it was real nevertheless as was the pain we felt for the loss and destruction.
Then one day a Tu-134 which had taken off just a few minutes earlier announced that they had a problem with the nose gear. It would not retract but it was probably no longer in the down and locked position either… They wanted to return to Ferihegy. We turned them around and they went into the TPS holding stack to burn off fuel. As they flew the race-track pattern, we discussed the next steps. Once they were down to minimum fuel, they would make a low pass over the tower and the airline technicians would try to take a visual of the nose gear to see what position it was in. Depending on the outcome, the Tu-134 would come in very slowly, keeping the nose high after touching down and then letting it sink slowly… if the gear collapsed, there would be only minimal energy in the airframe and hopefully it would dissipate quickly and the plane would stop with little damage. The emergency vehicles would be positioned at the best spot to reach the plane where it was expected to come to a halt.
This was the theory. How it would work in practice we did not know.
When the captain reported having reached the desired fuel level, we halted all other traffic. With only one runway and the sick Tu-134 down to minimum fuel, we did not want another aircraft blowing a tire or some similar mishap happening that would block that single runway.
The Tupoliev experts were swarming all over the tower by now and we cleared the stricken aircraft for a visual approach… that aimed at the obstacle lights of the control tower.
She was coming in real slow now, quite a feat for a 134… She was coming in low and from a direction no planes ever approached, no doubt making people living in the nearby communities wonder what was going on at the airport.
Then she was there, her underside exposed like we had never seen before. You could count the rivets but it was not the rivets everyone was looking at. It was the misbehaving nose gear that drew everyone’s attention. Passing overhead, her engines started to sing louder as they pushed her higher in a graceful turn to port, back into the air that was her familiar domain but from which she must now soon return to terra firma… with a nose gear of unknown status.
The technicians agreed to disagree… they could not determine whether the gear was in fact safe. With time fast running out, the captain proceeded to implement the only option left… land slowly and keep the nose high until the last moment.
To this point in time we all felt the stress but it was kind of in the background. Once the decision was made, things suddenly became focused and reality struck. Here was an aircraft with a potentially deadly condition on board and we will have to vector them to the ILS and clear them to land… and then wait and blink in unison with the flashing blue lights of the emergency vehicles.
Training took over and I was not nervous… just found myself sitting on the edge of my chair in the darkened den of Budapest Approach as I issued the vectors for the 134 to slowly approach the ILS localizer.
They will have completed the emergency drill in the cabin and our hearts went out to the crew and passengers who were of course much closer to the fire…
This was one of the older 134’s with the glass nose and the navigator sitting under the pilots in the nose of the aircraft. At three miles out the navigator called in to say that he was now leaving his post to sit back in the cabin as his place would be the first to go if the nose wheel collapsed. A two-man crew is normal these days but back then the two pilots and the navigator were the norm on the 134 and I could now imagine the two pilots facing uncertainty and also being robbed of the customary extra pair of eyes and hands…
We sent the 134 over to the tower frequency and then went out to the balcony facing the field to watch and pray (yes, we did pray… even in communist times).
The TU-134 with its sleek wings and rudimentary high lift devices was not exactly famous for its ability to fly slowly… but those guys were experts on the type and they made her do things that would have made even the designers shake their heads in disbelief. I swear the 134 seemed to be hanging in the air with almost zero forward speed, her nose high and the tires making almost no smoke as they kissed the asphalt. Then she rolled and rolled, the nose still up…sinking ever so slowly. Speed dropping gracefully she still refused to put her nose down although the wheels were now mere inches from the runway.
Then it happened. With a tiny puff of smoke the nose gear made contact… and held! A second later the 134 was stationary with emergency vehicles swarming all around her, gratefully happy for not having anything to do.
The incident didn’t even make the evening news. Probably just as well. After all, we did only what we had been trained for.
