Careful with the nosegear in your 787

APU on, lock pin not installed, gear lever moved up, and boom, you’ve got a few million in damages.

" About this morning, June 18th: the nose gear of a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner (G-ZBJB) British Airways collapsed while the aircraft was parked."

Video:

I dont understand these incidents and perhaps someone could explain.

Are you saying in a multi million dollar airplane that is full of sensors that “know” its on the ground that if you flip the gear lever up it still retracts them if the locking pin isnt in place?

Im not excusing someone forgetting the pin but what kind of design is this that lets the airplane system suck up the gear while there is weight on them and it is stationary?!

This has not much to do with sensors.
It’s not that the airplane system sucks up the gear, it’s the other way round.
Without hydraulic pressure gravity sucks down the aircraft :wink:

I don’t know the gear downlock mechanism of the 787, but that’s not an uncommon problem with some aircraft.

Oh ok thanks for the info.

So what is happening when you flip the gear lever up while a 787 is on the ground without locking pins? What causes the collapse? I know there are switches on the gear that sense when airplane weight is on the wheels.

Still dont really understand why this happens (apart from catastrophic metal fatigue in the gear leg or other structural issue)?

If you flip GEAR UP on the ground shouldnt the warning systems scream at you or something?

The thing is the plane is turned off, so no hydraulics most likely mean that if there is not a physical thing stoping it from going down it will go down.

However I agree with your previous point, this is a design flaw, since it should be quite easy to solve this issue considering technology nowadays.

Most important, you can’t simply move the landing gear lever UP on ground on the 747-787.
Due to the air/ground logic, the lever is locked in the down position.

You need to push the override button next to the gear lever with one hand and with the other hand you can move the lever to the UP position.

I don’t know if there’s a warning if you are doing that on ground, but it wouldn’t help since the gear will collapse at the same time the warning comes on.

Depending in the gear design, if there’s no residual hydraulic pressure and/or no overcenter position to keep the gear locked down, the gear will collapse.

@Hugothester that’s no design flaw since it’s impossible to accidentially move the gear lever to the UP position.

We can’t know honestly, too little information atm on why it collapsed.

The 787 is flying since more than 10 years and there are more than 1000 787 flying.
Looks rather unlikely that it’s a design flaw IMO.

The fact that a wheel can collapse on its own, even if there is a human error by not using the pins, looks to me like a design flaw, even more when you discover this has happened before.

However we can’t say yes or now, since the investigation has not yet taken place.

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While this type of news is extremely interesting, let’s keep the MSFS forums about MSFS-specific topics only. However, we do have an Aviation channel in our Discord if you wish to chat about IRL aviation and news. Something we can consider here in the future is an IRL aviation discussion area, however.