A couple of days ago two military planes collided while landing at Khartoum Airport in Sudan. The footage looked pretty awful, though fortunately there were apparently no fatalities.
The airport was shut down for several hours following the incident. At first we just saw a very limited angle of the planes colliding, which raised a lot of questions of what happened in the moments before that.
Now there’s footage of both of the planes landing, and this raises even more questions:
A clear footage of the two military aircrafts Colliding yesterday on the runway of #Khartoum international airport causing more than 10hours of airport closure #Sudan @flightradar24 @AviationSafety @Reuters @AlArabiya @BBCWorld pic.twitter.com/naBlBgQWky
— G.Banna (@jimmy_banna) October 4, 2018
What the heck is going on with that second plane?
Initially the theory was that the military planes were trying to do a formation landing, but if so, this looks like it was badly botched from the very beginning. Was the second plane incapable of doing a go around, or…?
Plane racing
Lived in Khartoum for 6 years and this was considered pretty normal. When you'd land in KRT there would be wrecks all around you, and every time there seemed to be a bit more...
That same dude on Twitter said there were two causalities.
What @Andrew said, spot on.
Looks like it could very well have been a formation landing. What you're seeing form the second plane is called "porpoising" and that can happen when you land hard and bounce (usually either flat on all three gear simultaneously or on the nose gear) and don't have sufficient elevator authority to flare on the subsequent touchdowns. You end up bouncing back and forth on the nose/mains. Very scary as a pilot if you don't recognize...
Looks like it could very well have been a formation landing. What you're seeing form the second plane is called "porpoising" and that can happen when you land hard and bounce (usually either flat on all three gear simultaneously or on the nose gear) and don't have sufficient elevator authority to flare on the subsequent touchdowns. You end up bouncing back and forth on the nose/mains. Very scary as a pilot if you don't recognize what's going on.
You can recover by adding power to regain speed and airflow over the elevators. That's obviously a problem if you're the trailing plane in formation...
Lucky the guy who was coming from behind to have a soft wall to stop him. He lands on the nose gear and the plane violently jumps several times. Too fast, too furious, that plane (the second) was going to be a write off anyway. Wonder if he had any flaps on aproaching the runway. It is definitely not a formation landing.
Sudanese pilots is what happened. Looks like a PIO or nose first landing that got out of control. Got it on the ground and let the nose bounce and let the situation get worse by not pulling the throttles to idle or full reverse.