The brutal 'touch and go' of a Lufthansa Boeing 747 at Los Angeles Airport

@DefAviation ES 4·24·2024 · 21:47 0

There are landings so hard that they are surprising, especially given the impacts that a commercial airplane can endure.

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This Tuesday, April 23, at the Los Angeles International Airport, one of those landings could be seen, or more correctly it would be called a "touch ang go", as aborted landings are known in aeronautical terms, in which the plane touches the runway but has to take off again, generally because it is going at a high speed and does not have enough space to complete the maneuver, or because the landing angle was not adequate.

Yesterday, the YouTube channel Airline Videos was doing a live broadcast of the operations at that airport. At point 56:11 we can see a Boeing 747-830 of the German airline Lufthansa, D-ABYP (MSN 37839) approaching the airport. It is a relatively recent plane, which made its first flight on May 16, 2014. The plane touched the runway in a brutal way with its rear landing gear, raising a large cloud of smoke (i.e. , burning the tires), after which the plane bounced, touched the runway again and resumed the air. I have inserted the video so that it starts playing at that point:

You can see some screenshots from the video here, which show what happened:

The D-ABYP making its approach. It has all its landing gear deployed.

The moment before touching the runway. Current commercial airplanes always set down their main landing gear first and then the front one, which is the least resistant.

The moment of the brutal impact. The shaking must have been quite noticeable in the passenger cabin. What a fright many must have had.

The 747 bouncing on the runway. It is tilted slightly forward and toward the starboard wing.

The moment of the second contact with the track. In this contact, the smoke generated by the burning of the tires did not rise. The plane is still tilted toward its starboard wing.

The plane is already stabilized and raising its nose to take flight again.

The plane remote flight. I have not found information on whether the plane has needed emergency repairs after this accident "touch and go", but it seems unlikely, since according to @jordibatlle, that Boeing 747 took off today on its return flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt.