[HN Gopher] NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston
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NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston
Author : verzali
Score : 140 points
Date : 2026-01-28 07:43 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle
|
| This seems to have been a training flight. Im sure the black box
| (if there was one) heard an excited "i have control" from the
| senior pilot once the grinding noise started.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That paragraph had me snort.
|
| Once you're grinding along the runway, is there anything the
| pilot can do?
|
| 'Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft
| touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended.
| The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides
| down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction.'
| sandworm101 wrote:
| From that footage we have absolutely no idea which pilot was
| flying, and certainly not what they were saying to each
| other.
|
| We know they called "three green" to tower. It would be
| impossible to see three green with the gear up. Doing so
| would require a hundred one-in-a-billion things to happen all
| at once. So both pilots screwed up. In such a situation it is
| expected that the instructor/check pilot take over
| immediately.
|
| Unannounced (ie surprise! Rather than a declared emergency)
| gear-up landings happen regularly and it always a pilot
| error.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Is this the same one that was randomly in the middle east for an
| extended duration with no explanation?
| heyflyguy wrote:
| What a bummer. We helped map the Kerrville floods for support of
| the state. Same day we mapped it, so did this WB-57 - only 35K
| feet above us. Such a historic and unique aircraft - I feel bad
| for the pilots onboard knowing it will likely total that aircraft
| even if it was a mechanical failure.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Was it flying at the same time? Maybe your plane is visible in
| the WB-57's imagery?
| jstanley wrote:
| Maybe stretched out into one massive smear of a plane, like
| when you drag your hand across a flatbed scanner
| dylan604 wrote:
| How long of an exposure do you think they would be taking?
| tester756 wrote:
| What will happen to the vehicle after such crash landing?
|
| Is it possible (reasonably) to repair it? or it will never fly?
| HPsquared wrote:
| That depends on a lot of factors. What is the damage, how much
| would it cost to repair, and is spending that much considered
| worthwhile by NASA or whoever owns it? (Or whoever buys it
| after this)
| dylan604 wrote:
| So the exact same thought process for any one dealing with
| insurance companies after an auto accident. This isn't really
| ground breaking analysis.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Indeed. Just laying out why nobody can know the answer at
| this point. Nobody knows any of those three yet.
| thomasjb wrote:
| One of them was returned to service after 40 years in the
| boneyard in Arizona, back in 2011, I would expect they'll look
| at the other airframes there to see if they're suitable sources
| for a rebuild. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of this
| one though, it was already doing pretty well for a design that
| first flew in 1949 (the English Electric Canberra design that
| was then built by Martin)
| pbalau wrote:
| Wait, this is THE Canberra? The Mighty Canberra? The RAF
| Luton Canberra?
|
| This gives those jokes an entire new dimension!
| altmanaltman wrote:
| It depends, but NASA has 2 more of these (currently under
| inspection, so not in flying condition). Given its importance,
| its most likely they will find a way to make it fly again.
| xattt wrote:
| I'm surprised that there are no airframes that can be rebuilt
| to support a similar function.
| vpribish wrote:
| it _is_ the airframe that was rebuilt to support this
| specific function
| xattt wrote:
| I meant other plane models that could be rebuilt for the
| same purpose.
| jccooper wrote:
| It's a mid-50s bomber. The skin will be easy to replace. Drill
| out the rivets, rivet on new sheet metal. I don't think it even
| dragged the wingtips.
|
| Might be some complications with the nose gear and the payload
| bay (the main gear is on the wings, and untouched) but nothing
| terribly complicated. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was
| designed with some assumption of belly landings; it's a
| warplane after all.
|
| Repairs surely isn't automatic, and who knows how tight that's
| program's budget is, but planes are repaired from such landings
| all the time, and if they attach any value to the vehicle it
| can be repaired, and not at great cost.
| ekianjo wrote:
| That's not a crash, that's a controlled landing
| Retric wrote:
| As neutrally as possible, a gear up landing is suboptimal.
| jcynix wrote:
| Isn't that "normally" done on a foam carpet prepared by the
| fire trucks?
| ranger207 wrote:
| No, the FAA recommends against creating a foam path. It
| reduces braking effectiveness and uses up supplies that
| might be needed to actually fight a fire
|
| https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/airports/airport_sa
| f...
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's the smoothest landing I've ever seen including normal
| ones on landing gear.
| Mawr wrote:
| Pfft. Hold my beer: https://youtu.be/Q9WNnJprwzU?t=48
| thesh4d0w wrote:
| That was beautiful. Pilot managed to drag the tail and slow
| down enough that it looks like the engines barely took a
| hit at all.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. If you
| can fly the aircraft again, it's a great landing.
| ortusdux wrote:
| See also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788327
| pants2 wrote:
| Beautifully controlled landing, well done to the pilot.
|
| This is certainly a dumb question, but could a plane like this
| land on a softer material to try to save the airframe? Like a dry
| lake bed, marsh, or golf course?
| sowbug wrote:
| One consideration is accessibility for first responders once
| the aircraft touches down.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Softer material is easier for the a part of the plane to dig
| into the ground and then the plane will flip over.
|
| Best example I could find: https://youtu.be/KEz-r3dpQdo
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Concrete is smooth and flat. Emergency services have easy
| access. If you land at a shallow enough angle, you're just
| scraping. Given how many planes there are in the air, gear up
| landings on a runway are well understood.
|
| Plowing the plane into a soft, uneven surface is far less
| predictable. You never know if you're going to hit a stump or
| large rock hidden by grass.
|
| It doesn't make sense trying to save the air frame if you're
| going to risk destroying it and killing the pilot in the
| process.
| bityard wrote:
| Not a dumb question at all, but incident management in aviation
| is all about saving the people on board first and foremost.
| Saving the airframe during an incident is considered a very
| distant bonus at the very best. No pilot ever got in trouble
| for sacrificing their plane to make the smoothest possible
| landing to protect the squishy meatbags on board.
|
| Landing outside the bounds of an airfield brings a bunch of
| other unnecessary risks as well, like hitting trees, people,
| cars, buildings, etc. And as a sibling comment noted, airports
| have a TON of protocols for emergency landings in place, such
| as clearing existing traffic from the runways and sky, and
| having ambulances and fire trucks standing by so they can be at
| the aircraft literally seconds after it skids to a stop. Golf
| courses typically do not.
| loeg wrote:
| > No pilot ever got in trouble for sacrificing their plane to
| make the smoothest possible landing to protect the squishy
| meatbags on board.
|
| Arguably Charles Del Pizzo did, quite recently.
| sonofhans wrote:
| He protected one meatbag (himself) at the risk of an
| unknown number of other meatbags on the ground. They were
| right to fire him.
|
| Context for others -- https://www.postandcourier.com/news/s
| pecial_reports/marine-f...
| loeg wrote:
| It's not really obvious to me whether he control over the
| plane such that he could have made a difference to
| whether the plane interacted with humans on the ground,
| or not.
|
| > Both investigations concluded that most highly
| experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in
| an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.
|
| I don't think the article supports your conclusion
| definitively. Ultimately, we don't really know how
| controllable the aircraft was or how well instruments
| were working. (I'm sure the military has a somewhat
| better sense of this, but we don't have their unredacted
| internal reports.) In general it is very challenging to
| fly aircraft without instruments in cloudy conditions,
| and the risk is particularly high low to the ground.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Either way, your original claim that he got in trouble
| for totalling the plane seems wrong.
| loeg wrote:
| In what way? He was unambiguously punished, and it was
| unambiguously because he ditched the plane. The only
| point of contention is whether the ditching was justified
| or not. Hence "arguably" in my original statement.
| Mawr wrote:
| A more typical question would be whether landing on water would
| be a better idea. The answer is always no -- it is always
| better for an aircraft to land at an airport. Always.
|
| The most core reason is that airports are designed for
| airplanes to land on them. Everything else follows from that.
| But, concretely:
|
| 1. Most airports you'd be landing on have dedicated emergency
| firefighters already on site who are extensively trained for
| exactly this sort of an event, so they'll be on top of your
| plane within minutes of touchdown.
|
| 2. The runway is appropriately large, with enough clearance in
| all three dimensions to accommodate malfunctioning aircraft.
|
| 3. In an emergency, you want to normalize the situation as much
| as possible, so that the only non-normal factor is the one
| you're dealing with -- here it's the lack of gear. It's much
| easier to do a normal landing and deal with one issue than to
| do a completely abnormal landing.
|
| 4. Concerns like fuel economy or material damage are nice-to-
| have luxuries that we can afford during normal operations. The
| second anything non-normal happens, the one and only concern is
| saving lives. I assure you the pilot of this plane was
| exclusively focused on getting his passengers safely on the
| ground.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Not softer, because that'll make it lawn dart, but dry lake
| beds yes.
|
| Edward's AFB is located at the edge of a dry lake bed exactly
| because it acts as a huge extended runway in case an aircraft
| under testing has problems landing and coming to a stop.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Why is such an ancient plane still being used? Lack of funding to
| use something newer? Or it has some capability that can't be
| replicated?
|
| I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain. Are they
| machining their own engine parts?
| ianburrell wrote:
| The WB-57 can fly at high altitude (>60,000ft) for long time.
| The NASA U-2 can fly higher but is likely more limited
| operationally.
| justin66 wrote:
| Yeah. Two crewmen, something like twice as much payload
| weight (originally designed to carry a nuclear bomb or two
| instead of a top-tier reconnaissance package), and apparently
| less ceremony in general than the U-2. The U-2 really wants
| to have a chase car (!) when landing to call out what the
| pilot cannot see, from the sound of things the WB-57 doesn't
| do that. (okay, some irony there considering recent
| events...)
| ianburrell wrote:
| I was thinking about what could replace WB-57. Large
| private jets (Gulfstream G650) can get up to 51k ft, and
| maybe could be modified to go higher. Global Hawk drone can
| go up to 60k ft, and the Air Force is retiring them.
| erickhill wrote:
| When I was in the Air Force in the early 1990s, we still used
| KC-135 "flying gas stations" that had been built during the
| cold war in the 1950s. While expensive to maintain they were
| far less expensive to fix than buying new and starting from
| scratch. With regular full maintenance checks in the hangars
| (wash them, inspect them with dental picks and flashlights,
| replace broken parts, etc.) we kept those planes in service and
| mission ready for decades.
|
| There was an entire supply chain of every single part ready to
| go, with technical manuals for every maintenance task you can
| imagine. If we couldn't fix something, it would go to the jet
| lab or machinists or whatever.
|
| The system in place is mind bogglingly good.
|
| /edited for a typo.
| derektank wrote:
| Hell, the KC-46 only entered service a few years ago and
| they're talking about extending the KC-135's service life
| into the 2030s.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The B-52H started rolling out of the factory in 1960 and is
| planned to remain in service until the 2050s.
| bityard wrote:
| I was part of a squadron that flew KC-135s in the mid 2000's.
| Those 135s looked positively modern inside and out, compared
| to the worn-out H-53s and C-130s that I worked on a few years
| prior at a training base.
| topspin wrote:
| > Why is such an ancient plane still being used?
|
| Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we
| had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique
| instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its
| systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare
| parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever
| conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred
| million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.
|
| > Are they machining their own engine parts?
|
| The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude
| versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original
| Avons. They are still in service today in military
| applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary
| concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these
| aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop
| getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls
| aren't that frequent.
|
| > I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.
|
| All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the
| Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and
| modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of
| what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has
| a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with
| large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.
|
| I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service.
| That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not
| appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are
| mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to
| provide replacement parts.
| bityard wrote:
| It's MUCH more expensive to design and build an aircraft from
| scratch than it is to repurpose and maintain an existing design
| that fits the requirements. The major cost sinks are not even
| the design and manufacturing, it's all of the testing,
| certification, training, documentation, maintenance planning,
| and so on.
|
| Plus, it's very likely that this plane is not an ancient as you
| think. New airframes are more efficient aerodynamically, weigh
| less, and offer more capabilities but depending on the role,
| those may not be huge advantages. Nearly everything ELSE on a
| typical airplane can be upgraded to modern standards. I haven't
| checked Wikipedia, but I highly doubt NASA's WB-57s are still
| running the original 1953 engines and avionics, for example.
| mrandish wrote:
| > I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.
|
| Everything that flies is expensive to maintain but the costs to
| maintain most older aircraft tends to be much lower than new
| ones, sometimes even if certain unavailable parts need to be
| rebuilt or fabricated. Part of the difference is newer designs
| tend to use advanced composites and manufacturing techniques
| which can yield increased performance and efficiency but are
| expensive and often require specialized techniques to
| service/replace.
|
| The second factor is that funding, designing, validating and
| manufacturing new military aircraft platforms has grown
| astronomically expensive for a huge number of reasons.
| jasonincanada wrote:
| We should build a drone system that attaches to the underbelly of
| planes and physically pulls the gear down
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Great idea!
|
| And if needed, to actually swap defective landing gear parts to
| whatever extent possible. Maybe difficult or impossible with
| current aircraft designs, but maybe future ones could be
| designed with this backup option. Maybe a secondary landing
| gear insertion point or something.
| amelius wrote:
| How about a drone system that IS the wheels.
| esseph wrote:
| Much better idea. Like a flying roller cart
| nradov wrote:
| Is that supposed to be a joke? The risk of a disastrous midair
| collision in that scenario is far worse than the risk of a
| gear-up landing.
| lysace wrote:
| Seems like controlled landings on the belly with the help of
| airport fire fighting crews tend to work though.
|
| I assume this is made possible by explicit system (aircraft +
| airport) design decisions agreed upon 50+ years ago.
| heyitsdaad wrote:
| 1) Build a mobile platform with wheels that starts at the
| beginning of the runway
|
| 2) matches speed with the plane as it enters runway.
|
| 3) Plane will "touchdown" on the mobile base gently since speeds
| are matched.
|
| 4) Lock the plane to base and decelerate the base in a controlled
| manner.
|
| If you can gently lock the base and plane you can even save the
| plane
| FpUser wrote:
| Next project: interstellar jump craft
| dmoy wrote:
| That seems like incredible overkill for a 1950s era bomber jet,
| no?
| amelius wrote:
| It can be reused.
| zabzonk wrote:
| That's an episode from "Thunderbirds".
| nradov wrote:
| Ha ha, but seriously that couldn't possibly work with any
| significant crosswind.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| it just means the mold should be tilted with respect to the
| travel direction: if you have the technology to match the
| speed, surely you have the technology to rotate the
| receptacle in the horizontal plane to match the horizontal
| plane rotation angle induced by crosswind.
| nradov wrote:
| The problem with such a silly, unrealistic Rube Goldberg
| style scheme is not only the aircraft attitude but the
| lateral velocity relative to the runway centerline.
| kortilla wrote:
| The plane will run out of fuel during step 1 or while on the
| way to an airport that has already completed step 1.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You're after a fast aircraft carrier.
| clort wrote:
| Ok so the plane is pretty much toast, though perhaps only the
| bottom of the fuselage as not sure if the wingtips touched the
| ground.
|
| I'm wondering about the runway at this point, does that damage
| the runway significantly? It seems that a runway out of order
| would be a massive problem..
| lexiathan wrote:
| It probably did damage the runway a bit, but given that these
| ancient planes are no longer in production, the cost to repair
| whatever damage was done to the plane (looks pretty extensive,
| from the video) is likely much more expensive than whatever
| work is needed to fix the runway.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I see comments about the saving the airframe on here. I bet it is
| salvageable considering the era it came from. It is like the
| difference between cars pre crumple zones and post. The
| 'cornfield bomber' story is an example of this [1]. Is it worth
| restoring vs is it salvageable are two different questions
| though.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
| Merad wrote:
| There probably isn't much structural damage to the plane aside
| from the scraping/grinding on the bottom. Don't misunderstand,
| that's going to be bad damage - we aren't just talking about
| scratched paint. But it looks like the pilot set it down soft
| as a feather, they're definitely a pro.
|
| Planes are so expensive that it's worth putting a lot of money
| into saving them. A replacement airframe comparable to the B-57
| would probably cost $10 million, then you'd probably spend that
| much again to customize it for NASA mission. Even if they need
| to spend a couple million dollars fixing the WB-57 it beats the
| alternative.
|
| Edit: It occurs to me that rather than use a different plane
| they'd probably reactivate another B-57 from the boneyard - but
| B-57's have been retired for > 50 years to restoring one would
| still be a significant project.
| vk6flab wrote:
| The aircraft was doing touch and go's, it was planning to land
| and immediately take off again, something you typically do to
| practise procedures.
|
| Speculation is that the pilot forgot to lower the landing gear,
| but I suspect the NTSB will likely determine the specific
| circumstances.
|
| The radio traffic is here on the VASAviation YouTube channel:
|
| https://youtu.be/zCTicb6of2w
| ubermonkey wrote:
| My uncle did a gear-up landing that way a number of years ago.
| He was fine, but the plane was a total loss from a financial
| perspective. It was a Moonie, and the prop hit the ground,
| which forced an engine rebuild as I understand it.
|
| Scary, but as they say any landing you walk away from...
| a_paddy wrote:
| Definitely not a Ryanair trained pilot with that smooth
| touchdown.
| coin wrote:
| Article makes no mention of "crash". Please don't make
| sensationalized edits of the title.
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