Los Angeles – A JetBlue airliner whose front landing gear became stuck at a 90-degree angle after takeoff landed safely Wednesday night after circling the skies over Los Angeles for nearly three hours.
Many of the 140 passengers watched live coverage of their plight on television monitors embedded in the backs of seats.
Passengers erupted in cheers when the plane stopped safely at Los Angeles International Airport at 6:18 p.m. Pacific time. The flight, with a crew of six, had taken off from Bob Hope Airport in Burbank en route to Kennedy International Airport in New York City.
The pilot brought the plane down on the rear wheels and slowly lowered the nose gear, with its wheels stuck at a 90- degree angle to the fuselage of the plane. As the front wheels met the tarmac, the tires erupted in white smoke and the wheels gave off sparks and flames as the plane skidded down a remote runway lined with emergency vehicles.
The wheels on the landing gear had somehow turned sideways after the plane, an Airbus A320, took off, making it impossible for the gear to fold into the body of the plane.
Passengers said they spent a tense time in the air, some crying, as the plane circled to burn off fuel and emergency workers on the ground prepared for the landing.
David Reinitz, a comedian traveling to New York to make a documentary, used his video camera to tape a farewell message to his girlfriend.
“We had live coverage (on the plane’s televisions) up until about 10 minutes before we landed,” Reinitz, 39, said. “That was the scary part, when they cut it off.”
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa met the passengers as they left the plane down a stairway, far from the main terminals. He said he spoke with the plane’s captain, Scott Burke, and praised him for grace under pressure.
“He was incredible,” Villaraigosa said. “He walked off the plane with a big smile on his face, just cool as a cucumber. He joked that he was sorry he put the plane down 6 inches off the center line.”
Many passengers chose to continue to New York on a flight from the Long Beach, Calif., airport, while others decided to fly today out of Burbank.
Christiana Lund, 25, who lives in New York, said the severity of the problem was not immediately clear to some passengers, who kept dozing or watching TV stations not broadcasting the news.
But soon crew members were instructing passengers on how to position themselves for an emergency landing, Lund said. They asked several passengers to move to the back of the plane, presumably to help keep the nose off the ground as long as possible.
Lund said she had no fear of flying again. “You got to get back on, you know,” she said.
The A320, a 150-seat airplane first flown in 1987, has been a boon to Airbus Industrie, its manufacturer. JetBlue operates a fleet of 81 of the aircraft, according to the airline’s website.
According to the website of the National Transportation Safety Board, in 1999, an Airbus A320 operated by America West had a similar problem when its nose wheels rotated 90 degrees. In that incident, the two pilots were able to land the plane at the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, and the plane was evacuated.
A passenger on Wednesday’s JetBlue flight, Alexandra Jacobs, said the most difficult part was knowing that her husband and parents might be watching the drama on live television. She is six months pregnant.
“My first thought was for my husband,” who met her at the airport in Los Angeles, she said. “I was thinking, ‘You’re going to lose your baby and me.”‘
Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer who lives in Los Angeles because her husband is a television writer, described the landing as “an out-of-body experience.”
“The flight attendants were chanting, ‘Brace, brace, brace,’ like a mantra,” she said. “It was like a prayer. It was real scary. And then we smelled burning rubber, and the plane stopped and a big cheer went up.”