How Do You Land A Plan With No Controls?
For an aeroplane to, well, function, it needs not only engine power but also hydraulics. The hydraulic system controls the rudder, which helps steer the plane left and right, the ailerons which pilots use to steer the plane up and down, among many other functions. A failure of the hydraulic system spells almost certain death for anybody aboard that airplane.
So imagine this scenario. You’re an airline pilot, sitting in the cockpit of big-ass DC-10. You just made a smooth takeoff and everything is going swell. Suddenly, somewhere at the back of the tail, you hear GBOAHHH. Your co-pilot starts to initiate emergency procedures while Yoruba aunties deploy their anointing oil amongst screams of “blood of Jesus.” You try to take control of the plane but the controls are dead. You can’t steer left or right. You can’t lift the plane up or down. The plane just keeps turning right ever so slightly. The lives of 296 people are in your hands in a machine that’s just turnioniown.
In a car, this would be the equivalent of losing your steering wheel while driving on the express, forcing you to control the car with only the accelerator and brakes. It’s a plane so you can’t exactly just stop.
That’s the situation Captain Al Haynes found himself in on 19 July 1989. He was the captain of United Airline Flight 232, a routine flight between Chicago and Denver.
A plane that literally could not be controlled with 296 lives on board stuck in a right-turning loop. How we go run am?
Haynes had an unorthodox idea. By increasing the power to the left engine, they could stop the plane from turning right. But there were other problems. The plane kept trying to pitch down, which would have meant certain death in a fiery explosion for every person on board. To fix this, the pilots increased the speed of the plane, so that it stayed in the air. But this caused the plane to point up a bit too high, causing the engine to stall and almost stop. So the pilots had to continually keep reducing and increasing engine speed. Which kind stress?
Now that they’ve (more or less) stabilised the aircraft (for now), e remain to land. Remember, the pilots couldn’t turn the plane left nor right but still had to figure a way to get to the nearest airport AND LAND WITHOUT CONTROLS. Omo.
Because they were controlling the plane only with the engines, they were flying too high and too fast to even try to land. The nearest control tower to which they had reported the emergency to had given them the directions to the nearest airport.
They’ve found an old military airport in Sioux City, Iowa they could land at, but they still had more problems.
Failure of the hydraulics system meant they could not deploy the landing gear (the plane’s tyres). The pilots had to decide whether to try and land the plane on its belly or try and deploy the landing gear manually. The DC-10 was so designed that if the hydraulics failed, the tyres could be manually deployed. Not that they would go and use hand to push it down oh. They’ll just open the gear doors and rely on gravity to let the tyres fall out. They decided to deploy the gears.
Now, to land, pilots had to line up with the runway, but as steering no dey, they had to rely on luck and engine power to try and line the plane with the runway. Remember that the plane was turning right oniown in the beginning? Haynes decided to let the plane continue turning right until they were facing the runway.
To prevent the plane from catching fire (you know they just took off so they had a full load of fuel), they dumped excess fuel from the aircraft. The tower gave them a runway to land on but because they couldn’t exactly turn, they faced a different runway which fire trucks had parked on to get ready for the crash. As the fire trucks saw that it was on top of them the pilots were going to land, na so all of them start to japa. Who wan die?
At precisely 4 pm, the pilots attempted landing. With luck, they would land safely. Unfortunately, they were only half lucky. The pilots noticed too late that they were going a bit too fast, and the right wing struck the runway, spilling the remaining fuel which caught fire immediately. The plane’s tail also broke off, and the aircraft bounced several times, breaking the plane into several main pieces.
Of the 296 people on board, 112 people died. Most of them died from the impact of the plane hitting the ground so hard, but 35 people who were near the fuel tank died from smoke inhalation in the fire after the crash, despite the fire crews best efforts to put out the blaze. All four pilots survived and eventually returned to duty. Despite the high death toll, they were commended for their genius and calm handling of the situation.
You might wonder why this was considered a successful landing. Although, 112 passengers died, but 60% of them survived. Believe it or not, 52 children were lapped in this flight (after this accident, regulations demanded that children be bought their own seat); 11 of them died. For a plane that had zero flight controls, it was a miracle that anybody survived.
I talked about the cause of the crash in this thread. If you want a more in-depth and technical analysis of the crash, you can find its Wikipedia entry here.
