In World War 2 there was a portable/temporary runway technology known as Marston Mats consisting of perforated metal plates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marston_Mat). They are very durable - near my grandfather's home there was an emergency landing zone made up of these rectangular plates, and they were still there 40 years after the war. Is there a modern equivalent that could be brought to bear?
In the Falklands war the British Forces established a Forward Operating Base for its Harriers STOVL jets at San Carlos, using Prefabricated Surfacing Airfield interlocking panels.
I came home once in Bristol, UK and there was a Harrier hovering a few tens of feet above my house slowly rotating. I do not know why it was there. I lived at the end of a runway.
It left once I pulled into my driveway.
Concorde used to miss my roof by a very short amount when it would land on the runway, and everything would jiggle off my shelves.
I have a bunch of those WW2 mats I got back when our access way was muddy in the winter. For cars you only need to lay down two strips, no need to cover the whole width of the road. They're not so hard to find in the French countryside. Some people bring them along on their 4x4s when they make excursions in the winter.
I'd be very worried about the wheels sinking into the dirt, which steel mats would help prevent. But if the ground freezes sufficiently hard, it should also do the trick.
edit: sorry, I just realised you were talking of a one off, for this plane. Naturally it'd be fine frozen, but you'd have to wait a bit, until the ground froze a bit. eg, not just the surface. Here that usually takes a month or more, because the ground takes quite some time to cool.
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The road gets warm in the winter, even at -40C, if there is a lot of traffic. Snow is smushed, it is warmed by the tires, due to friction, and even sublimation happens.
If there is enough traffic, frozen ground can become thawed. Especally at a mere -10C. The dirt road in front of my house confirms this in winter, with potholes and wet spots, and not from salt.
Landing events have even more friction. And many aircraft are far heavier than cars.
Rare teaffic would be fine I guess, but a mildly busy airfield might be different.
moving aircraft do not have spinning drive wheels, and they start having increasing lift from the wings right away with increasing speed. I think sinking into desert sand, maybe, but not dirt on a field. A bigger concern would be excessive bumps/ditches and/or soggy bogs.
Ever driven a car through a field? What looks smooth is often anything but, and airliners are simply not designed to take off from unprepared surfaces.
Flattening frozen ground seems significantly more difficult than just laying down panels.
Ice runways are relatively common in some places. They pump water water onto them to create a flat surface. Similar to ice roads used for accessing oil fields and mines.
I suspect the biggest concern operating off of an earthen runway is ingestion of FOD. For unimproved runways the 737 Classic could be fitted with so-called gravel kits to reduce the chances of ingesting crap from the runway on takeoff. That's why you still see 737-200s in service in the wintery parts of Canada – the fans on the NG and MAX (and A320) are too big to make gravel kits practical.
However, where the weight itself is an issue, Indian Airlines (now Air India) ordered some A320s with beefier landing gear precisely to operate something that heavy off of less than great paved runways.
Ural's not going to have much in the way of manufacturer support though so their options are a bit limited.
That would definitely help. An art shop I use has modern versions of them in their gravel lot. They're made for large wheels such as those of ground vehicles and possibly aircraft, but not so nice for smaller wheels such as for a bicycle or scooter.
Incidentally, my grandfather was a radio and cryptographic technician who was primarily forward deployed to such minimally-prepared, temporary fields while graders were still leveling the ground.
This kinda feels like how after an auto accident, if the car needs like 15k of body work and the frame is warped, but not enough to total loss it… and they try and repair the car, but afterwards there’s always little things wrong… alignment gets slightly off, weird creaks and squeaks you never had before, sudden phantom electrical issues. I’m not sure id want to ride in a plane where they “cleared out all the mud and straw” from the engine and they say it’s good to not be refurbished.
I understand what you mean, but airplanes aren’t the same as cars in this way. It’s in the manufacturer’s and airliner’s interests for the airplane to be as maintainable as possible. Commercial airliners are designed to be used 24/7 for decades. These are long-term investments and idle time is expensive.
Airplanes and cars are regulated as differently as cars and watermelons. If an airliner literally encountered phantom electrical issues it would be grounded immediately, and they’d be fixed — that’s the point of all the civilian infrastructure, like the FAA, that we’ve built up around air travel. I know, it’s not perfect, there are mistakes and sometimes corruption, but for the most part it works. Many parts of every airplane in the sky have been replaced multiple times. It’s the only way they work.
You forget that Russia is under heavy sanctions (which likely lead to the accident in the first place), and they have a difficult time maintaining their normal planes, let alone those that crash land or take off from fields
According to https://www.planespotters.net/airframe/airbus-a320-200-ra-73..., the plane was leased from AerCap and registered as VQ-BFW (Bermuda) until 23 Mar 2022, and then re-registered as RA-73807 - so yes, this is one of the stolen planes. But the spare parts situation is not related to that...
I have found an article https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aircraft-... about AerCap receiving 645 million dollars for 17 (or 18?) aircraft used by Aeroflot, but Ural Airlines being independent of Aeroflot, I don't think this plane is part of that agreement.
Officially, no. In reality there are ways around it. There are always local or Chinese knockoffs, and other aircrafts that can be used as sources of spare parts. This one might well end up like this if too many things go wrong. It’s obviously suboptimal and a bit of a gamble.
The difference makes sense because if a car fails, it just stops and you tow it to get fixed. But if a plane fails, it falls out of the sky, killing everyone on board.
I would suggest you _not_ read it if you _don't_ want to learn how they will frequently have planes completely dissembled and repaired right under the eyes of waiting passengers. They even cover up company logos and plane identificaiton numbers so people like yourself don't feel unsafe in a recently repaired plane.
Planes you fly in will have many repairs. Standard repairs. One-off repairs. Completely custom engineered repairs.
An entire book of all the modifications from stock that has accumulated over the decades accompanies each plane.
One accident comes to mind where a plane that was improperly repaired after a tailstrike crashed seven years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123. However, if the repair would have been done according to spec, that probably wouldn't have happened. Of course, they shouldn't just "clear out all the mud and straw", after they can hopefully fly it to a maintenance facility it has to be thoroughly inspected and any damaged parts replaced, but it is definitely possible (if the takeoff goes reasonably well) to get it into a condition where it can fly without problems for the rest of its expected service life. Two more examples of accident aircraft that were subsequently repaired and flew for many more years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#Retirement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006#Afte....
To me it says something about the value of a busted plane, to Russian airlines in the face of sanctions. Maybe that's reading too much into it and Ural's leadership are just miserly.
Obviously not every plane has such an interesting past, but it'd be an interesting/morbid curiosity thing to have a service where you let it know what flights you're taking and it texts you during boarding with any questionable details of the specific aircraft you're getting on.
"This plane ran off the runway in any icy landing in Minneapolis back in '06"
"This plane was decommissioned and sat idle in the desert for 15 months between owners"
"This plane was used to evacuate US government workers from Afghanistan"
...
Although I wonder how many would just be something boring like "this plane was delivered 2 years ago and has been in routine, problem-free service since".
Hmm that could be a cool feature for Flighty. You just need to build a database of tail numbers and news events, which is much harder than “just”. I pay attention to tail numbers to see if I’m getting on the same plane again.
Modern airliners are tested and engineered to an extremely high degree of reliability.
The manufacturer tells you how many flight cycles the airframe is certified for because they know how much stress cabin pressurization, takeoff, and landing have on the airframe and how long it will take to start developing cracks due to metal fatigue.
In fact they even have specified procedures for hard landings, gear failure landings, excessive G-load events, etc. Such things require specific inspections of specific areas, have specified tolerances for torsion/deformation, and in some cases they reduce the airframe's remaining service life. For example with high-G load event the mechanics must measure the angle of the wings and if there is more than X permanent deflection of the wing the wings must be repaired/replaced.
Emergency landing an airliner in a field is absolutely one of the scenarios covered by both airframe and engine manufacturers. They will have specific maintenance items to check for that along with advice on taking off from the field. I don't know about Airbus but Boeing even offers test pilots and emergency maintenance mechanics for such scenarios. If the airline pays Boeing will checkout the plain, make required repairs, and have their best pilots fly it back to your maintenance depot.
Due to the fact that it's a plane, it comes with a truckload of books.
These books describe every possible failure and respective diagnostic and repair procedures. Multiple planes of this type have been broken on purpose in different modes to figure out what can be bent where and by how much before it becomes a problem.
Planes roll out to the soft ground and ingest foreign objects every year, the kind of strain increased rolling resistance does to the airframe is nothing new, there are well defined procedures to getting the plane back on deck.
Ural Airlines is currently under sanctions. The plane in question is effectively stolen property (like most airlines the planes were purchased with loans/leases from the manufacturer's finance arm, and Ural stopped making payments last year). Russian airlines are operating planes without the correct service intervals.
1) There's plenty of reasons their planes could go bad without landing in fields. If they want to make sure this particular plane is fit to fly, they can.
There is currently a scandal around undocumented parts making it into American planes [1]. I’m curious to when we’ll be able to look back at the safety and maintenance records of officially-maintained planes and those flying Russian style.
One part of PPL training is soft/rough field takeoffs. Usually you go through the motions on a paved runway but maybe you're flying off a grass runway. Anyhow, use flaps to increase lift, apply back pressure to reduce the load on the nose wheel, rotate early, and use ground effect to accelerate. Maybe they'll stick bigger tires on it or use a JATO rocket to help with the acceleration.
There is no JATO option available for the A320. There is, however, a "high flotation" landing gear option with 4 wheel bogeys, which was only purchased by Air India, instead of 2 wheel bogeys that the majority of A320s have. However since Russia is under embargo, it seems unlikely that they would be able to get parts and Airbus support to do this kind of modification, and it is probably unneeded if they wait for the ground to freeze.
I don't think there's any place to attach rockets to an A320. Probably they'll just lighten the aircraft as much as possible by stripping out all unnecessary equipment, and do some construction work on the field to turn it into something vaguely resembling a runway.
OMG soft field technique in an Airbus! I'm sure there is no published flap setting for that. I wonder if the company would even hint at a best guess. I suppose similar to short field which probably is in the book.
B. Prep the runway surface with steel matting and wait until the time of year when the soil is hardest. (January)
C. Field (literally) replace the main gear with double bogie assemblies borrowed from Air India.[1] The single bogie gear risk collapse or sufficient rolling resistance preventing attainment of V1.
D. A rejected takeoff (RTO) contingency plan. Firstly, the runway surface should be twice as long as anticipated. Secondly, firefighters should be available to extinguish brake fires to prevent any wildfire or airframe damage.
Checking with my sources, enough of Air India's former A320-221 fleet survives mostly intact in France in storage.
Letting air out of the tires and going now isn't a viable solution because they're going to land on a regular runway. They'll wait for winter when the ground is harder.
In January, there'll be 50 cm of snow and the ground will be frozen. Pour water on the ground, smooth it with tractors, let it freeze and be covered with a bit of snow for friction. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/101015/
It's rarely economically feasible to tank in enough water to form an ice runway for heavy aircraft. They will need to rely primarily on heavy snowfall and then prepare that as a hard surface that can bear the pressure load of the aircraft takeoff roll. If there are large wood mills nearby, pykrete reinforcement maybe an option.
And they better plan for EMAS at the end of the usable length of this or that plane is likely to skid off into the woods.
Well, if you pour a bit of water on snow, it melts and then freezes altogether, forming ice too. You don't need large volumes of water for that, just couple of trucks of water twice a week.
Plus, the ground is frozen 1 m deep by January. It's hard enough for one take-off roll.
Reminds me of the time a 747 Dreamlifter[0] accidentally landed at the wrong airport (a tiny public airfield). Boy was that crazy what they had to do to get the plane back in the air.
Edit:
[0] - thx to commenter below for the reminder it was big bertha (aka the 747 Dreamlifter) and not just a 747. Been almost a decade and I forgot.
I wonder who will be the "lucky" pilot who gets to attempt the take off? Do they get massive hazard pay? Or will be it management's least favorite pilot?
Doubt it will be hard to find someone. There are plenty of test pilots and ferry pilots or other special flight circumstance pilots that would love to have this on their resume.
Seems like if it fails they are not much worse off than today: either way they are short one aircraft. The cost of trying to fly it out much be a lot <<< less than the value of the plane.
Good luck to the pilot though -- if it doesn't work the result could be fatal!
The pilot of that flight (well, the landing portion, Boeing apparently supplied pilot and copilot for the take-off), Carlos Dárdano, just retired earlier this year:
Unless they pave 1 mile of runway to accommodate this, I anticipate this going pretty poorly. A quick search prices A320s at around $100M, seems worth the effort.
You'd be surprised, even +5C during the day will turn that shallow frozen water back to liquid.
But when it hits, it happens quickly. Every year people dogsled on a lake outside Whitehorse, Yukon in November. Often it's pure liquid on November 20th, and yet they will dogsled on it before the last day of the month.
Interesting question: Can a jet take off from a (very) low friction runway? Seems similar to the classical problem of whether a take-off from a conveyor belt is possible :)
That runway has been carefully prepared to have high friction:
> The original construction of the runway was done over two years and accomplished using a laser cutter to level the blue ice near the station [...] Finally, two snow groomers with tillers grind a small layer of ice to create a top layer of crushed snow and ice that gives the runway the necessary friction for aircraft to operate.
This is a 17 year old aircraft, so I think it's only worth one fifth of that at best. They may be better off just buying a used one, rather than risk putting this into service.
A treadmill wouldn't help the plane take off. What Mythbusters showed was that it's not a hindrance to the plane, because planes don't need ground traction. They do need to be moving forward, relative to the air they're flying through, in order to generate lift. A treadmill, if it pushed the plane backwards, would not allow it to take off "in place", and actually the fact that a treadmill wouldn't push the plane back is the whole reason a plane can take off on a treadmill.
Or to put it differently, the only treadmill an airplane could take off on would be the length of a runway.
They certainly do. First, they need it to get the pointy end airplane pointed in the right direction. Then, they need it until they are going fast enough for the rudder to work.
Mythbusters didn't get it. The whole point is for the treadmill to accelerate so it could exert a force on the wheels due to wheels' inertia. Sure that kind of acceleration is somewhat unrealistic, but ignoring the task conditions is just bad.
Most people wrongly believe that the situation is similar to that of a car on the highway. If a car is capable of going ~80 miles per hour, and you put it on a treadmill going 80 miles an hour in the other direction, the car will run in place on the treadmill. The takeoff speed of a jet is something like 160 mph, so the picture most people have is running a treadmill at -160 mph, and they picture the airplane running in place just like the car. As Mythbusters showed, that's not what will happen, the plane will just move at 320 mph relative to the treadmill.
Of course you could imagine a situation that's not analogous to the car at all, in which we just dictate that however fast the treadmill needs to move to exert a force on the jet equal to that of the engines, it will move that fast. That means we've defined the situation in just a way that by definition, the airplane will not be able to move forwards. What most people don't realize, though, is that doing this is not like stopping the car on the highway. In fact the force exerted by the ground on the wheels during takeoff is so small that to effectively stop the plane, you'd have to spin the treadmill fast enough to destroy the wheels and carriage. And maybe even that wouldn't do it!
A car capable of 80 mph, assuming some gearbox/rpm headroom, will jump off the 80mph treadmill too, normally there's a lot of drag to overcome which isn't there on a treadmill.
The second paragraph checks out: with a realistic plane on an unrealistic treadmill either the wheels will fall off or the treadmill will produce enough airspeed to lift off the plane vertically up.
I suppose if the wheels were large enough cylinders then they could provide lift as well, although they would need to be spinning in the opposite direction.
TThough unmentioned in the article, their thoroughness (& the value involved) implies they'll have a fix in place before attempting take-off – perhaps some form of quick/temporary pavement, perhaps assisted by seasonal freezing.
(Might a glassy-ice surface, created with pumped water, under durable winter freeze conditions be ideal? Does a jet need – or even necessarily want – any ground traction to take off?)
My dad worked at Galena AFB in Alaska during the Cold War. They had big problems with the runway icing up, and it was pretty much a 24 hour operation keeping the runway free of ice.
One person proposed coating the runway with linseed oil to keep the ice from forming. Desperate, the AF tried it.
It did keep the ice off. However, the first jet that rolled onto the runway and came to a stop, slowly but surely slid off the runway. Then they had an even more expensive operation to remove the oil.
Some traction is needed until the airplane is moving fast enough so the control surfaces work. Otherwise, off the side of the runway you go.
Of course, with a twin engine jet you could vary the engine thrust to keep the airplane straight, but there are big problems with that:
1. pilots aren't trained to do that
2. the engine response to changing throttle positions is pretty slow. Imagine trying drive a car when you turn the wheel, and ten seconds later the car starts to turn
Winter ice roads are routinely made in climate in that place. Except glassy ice is actually very hard to produce. Instead you get a spongy surface, plus it snows there frequently, and snow isn't slippery.
The Wright brothers' original vision for airplanes was that they could pretty much take off and land from a basic field. And they did seem to consider the idea of heavily prepared airfields something of a failure case.
There are very good reasons things didn't go that way. But, as is often the case, the original vision had a very pure and strong idea in it that has been somewhat lost. It's still alive in helicopters, and some other air vehicles, but it'd be cool if future aircraft were more robust in this way.
The Wright Flyer massed 274 kg. Of course it could take off from an unprepared field-- with a modern engine, it could be doing nine foot takeoffs like in STOL competitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMVjYT6laKo
Gliders are made to land in random fields without major obstacles (like cows, fences or hay bales) and regularly do that when they can't manage to glide to an airport.
You need to disassemble the plane afterwards (a routine operation, gliders are built that way) or possibly even have a powered airplane land nearby and aero-tow you back up if the field is good enough for that. :-)
No, it is a closed question, it has been for a while. They had the contractual obligations to return the airplanes, no one gave them the right to buy those
Essentially due to western government sanctions, leasing companies are forced to break the lease (law of the land). In retaliation, Russian government sanctions are blocking airlines from returning the planes (law of the land too).
Both are just following laws and rules in their respective jurisdiction.
And with western countries confiscating assets belonging to private citizens just because they have Russian citizenship (with only tangential relationship to Russian government and zero influence on Ukrainian war), EU/US are not exactly in a place to get on high horse.
Can they just do "ice-road aircraft" and make a reality show out of it?
Or some kind of documentary. It's super fascinating to follow along with the decisions (and reasoning) in real-time and it would be amazing to see the attempt/payoff with all the risk that remains. Flood field, ice-road?
It’s too bad that HN doesn’t allow multimedia responses; I’m imagining a bunch of memes of farmers busing passengers wearing peasant garb to the plane in a hay trailer behind a tractor, or passengers boarding via a grain elevator hehehe
I think at some height that becomes possible, but just going up would probably beyond the maximum altitude of most helicopters. However if the helicopters were to fly horizontally, the plane would develop its own lift and it could engage the engines and continue.
Vso on a transport category aircraft is way faster than a helicopter is going to carry it. You’d be better off just dropping it at a real airport, if you can lift it anyway.
Using multiple helicopters (OEW of the aircraft is 40 tons, so you'll need at least two helicopters) to lift the same weight makes you run into physical problems that haven't been overcome yet. It's really hard to reach some sort of stable equilibrium in such a configuration.
Russians are likely the people who have the most experience with that so far, and they opted for other solutions despite throwing spaceflight-money at the problem:
Maybe with modern technology and computer-controlled flight it could be made safe, but getting into that would completely defeat the point, which is to find a cheap way to move the plane.
the issue with dropping an airliner from height is by the time it gains enough airspeed, it no longer has control authority to pull out. Airliners are not really designed to go through a dive like that and come out in one piece.
Glide restarts of engines are possible (if not core locked) but it also isn't something done very often.
As long as it doesn't end up in a flatspin an airliner should be able to pull up from a dive. For an extreme example where this was tested in practice, in the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_006 incident, a pilot lost control of a 747 & ended up diving 30k feet at speeds approaching/potentially exceeding mach 1, then pulled 5 Gs leveling off at 10k feet once he regained situational awareness, & they were still able to land safely, although there was some damage
IMO the bigger problem would be needing multiple helicopters pulling together - wind or the jet's engines might pull the helicopters enough that they'd crash into each other, & you'd definitely want to start the engines before freefall..
