Ahh the Springtime

Ahh the springtime! Warmer days, sun shining, everybody out flying in the clear skies. The sweet smell of avgas, the thrum of aero engines running, nosewheels collapsing... Yes, you read that correctly.

It was gorgeous out today. Warm and Sunny enought that for most the day we just left the hangar door open to enjoy the fresh air and sunlight. Around mid-afternoon I was working away and looked up to see James and Brian (my coworker and my boss) pushing a Cessna 172 into the hangar. Nothing too out of the ordinary, we have lots of planes coming in and out of our hangar all the time. Except something was wrong with the picture I was seeing. The airplane was tilted forward at a very unusual angle. That was because it had some slight nosewheel problems. Ok not so slight. The airplane as it turned out is pretty much a write off. Some student pilot and instructor somehow managed to impact the ground hard enough to push the nosestrut all the way up into the engine compartment. Only about 3/4 of the wheel was left exposed out the bottom of the airplane. The outer 4" of the props were folded back nicely. When we took the top cowl off to look inside, you could see the bottom bracket that braces the nose strut to the belly of the airplane had been ripped off its anchor points and folded up, and part of the firewall was crumpled along with it. The firewall is essentially the core of an airplane. That's what the engine mount is bolted to, and basically the rest of the airplane is run into or back from that point as well. It's pretty much the strongest part of an airplane. The bolts that mount the top part of the nosestrut to the firewall were also all sheared off as the strut was pushed up further into the nose.

Needless to say it was not something you see everyday. I wish I could post some pictures, but I probably shouldn't, as a certain amount of annonymity is probably good at this point. The plane doesn't belong to anybody I know, apparently its from a flight school in the Toronto area. Both student and pilot are ok. I feel bad for the instructor. It will probably be bad news for him, but for all we know there may have been little he could have done. If a student lacks the finess to land properly, and things start to go bad close to the ground, sometimes there's precious little time for the instructor to intervene and regain control of the situation. Then again it could be all the instructor's fault. I didn't see it happen, and I wasn't there, so I can't really comment. It was certainly interesting to see an airplane in that kind of shape coming into our hangar however.