Flight AC837 on an Emergency Call

Also not a pilot, but a lifelong aviation buff: It's not safe, but it's a lot less dangerous than many other things that can go wrong. A landing with main gear locked and nose gear misbehaving is pretty survivable; a belly landing is dicier, but still well within the "everybody walks away" range of likelihood. And if it really is just a single missing wheel - well, that's why there are two of them on each axle. Again, it's not the day you want to have, but if that's the only thing wrong then chances are good of everyone walking away.

edit: That said, as noted elsewhere in the comments, it's pretty pointless to speculate, especially when a linked article mentions more issues than just a wheel having come off. (Although it's not unreasonable to notice that in particular, seeing as an Air Canada Dash-8 dropped a wheel on takeoff just last month.)

According to Air Canada, it was a tire rupture (one of 10) on takeoff and the emergency landing is due to an engine issue. Presumably the tire entered the engine.

"A spokesperson for Air Canada told Sky News: "Air Canada flight AC837, Madrid to Toronto, experienced an engine issue shortly after take-off. A tire also reportedly ruptured on take-off, one of 10 on this model of aircraft."

https://news.sky.com/story/air-canada-flight-returning-to-ma...

I'm not involved with the airline industry in any way, but I would think that since landing gear is a highly mechanical, moving piece with plenty of failure points, airliners are probably designed with a margin of error to withstand gearless landings without loss of life.

Need not be a big problem, some planes landed missing a wheel without even noticing.

https://avherald.com/h?article=4c29e455&opt=0

https://avherald.com/h?article=4b92a56d&opt=0

https://avherald.com/h?article=4b4af152&opt=0

https://avherald.com/h?article=4a7d012c&opt=0

Gear up landings aren't that uncommon in smaller planes.

A similar 767 made a gear up landing in 2011 with no injuries. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOT_Polish_Airlines_Flight_16

Common risks are Aircraft skidding of the runway, fire in the wheel well.

Mitigating factors: Rear wheel brakes should still work. Reverse thrust can further help slow down the aircraft.

Given the response time of emergency evacuation + fire response teams, likelihood of mass casualties are low.

Not very dangerous, they have procedures for this. Depending what is missing they may do a belly landing or if it’s one of the main gear they might even be ok to do a gear down landing.

I would imagine a water landing over still water would be best. Go as slow as you can while skimming over the water letting it slow you down and have emergency boats out there to quickly rescue passengers.

There was a “West Wing” episode where Air Force One’s landing gear wouldn’t come down; they talked about the possibility of a “hard landing” on a runway sprayed with (fire suppressing) foam, IIRC.

Edit: looks like the foam practice was discontinued in 2002: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_path

>And of course, it's Air Canada. I have had/heard of no end of maintenance issues with their planes.

Their safety record regarding maintenance is pretty good as far as I know.

Looks like the plane will attempt to land at 7:30pm GMT +1 (according to many comments in the feed)

Watched them come down. Looked like an uneventful landing from that feed's perspective. Hopefully everything is ok.

also, I don't know if is related, but this morning some traffic was delayed or rerouted to other airports because there was a incident with drones flying too near of Barajas airport.

Planes are designed to land without or with partial landing gear. That's the redundancy.

Having 4 or even 6 wheels per landing gear.

It does look a bit asymmetric on the left there. But difficult to say given that there are 4 wheels on each side.

Edit: NVM forgot to use my glasses..