Username Protected wrote:
Wow, that nose gear appears to be nearly 8 ft long.
Longer. Doing the walkaround, I couldn't even jump high enough to touch the gear door on the nose.
Hell for stout, too, although it doesn't look it. I once watched FROM THE GROUND
as a Connie smashed into the ground on a horribly botched landing, first one main, then the other, and then the nose gear. Must've badly rattled the crew, because there was no semblance of control, the airplane departed the runway shortly thereafter, proceeded through the infield a couple of hundred feet laterally off the main runway as it slowed. About half the speed was gone by the time it reached the cross runway, which was a couple of feet higher than the grass. That literally tossed the entire airplane back completely off the ground, maybe ten feet of daylight below the wheels, before smashing back heavily to earth, turning about 45 degrees as it did so, and sliding to a stop in a huge cloud of dust that obscured the aircraft. Next thing you know, here comes the Connie emerging from the dust cloud, taxied back onto the runway, and right down to it's parking spot as if they did it that way all the time! Maybe they did.
I had a very serious conversation with myself over what I thought I had seen, as no one else around me commented, and it was a fair sized airshow. A very surreal moment! I strolled by about an hour later, and they were well under way to changing the right-side nose gear wheel and tire. That wheel had lots of dirt and grass stuffed in it, between the wheel and the tire, and the wheel had a major crack.
The Connie had a very funny nose wheel, if you cranked it hard over (to the left in this case), the whole right tire lifted off the ground, allowing removal and replacement! with no equipment, except a wrench for the axle-nut! They had a spare, and it was as good as new in time to fly later that day.
I very seriously doubted what I had seen. Ran into a dear friend, a very senior check pilot, and one of us asked the other, "Did you see that landing?" We each danced around the subject before deciding that yes, we had both seen it, and we both described it exactly the same way to each other. And never mentioned it again.
