Lufthansa Boeing 787 experiences forward landing gear collapse, while parked and unloaded of passengers

[AerialTorpedoDude69]

Lufthansa employees injured after Boeing 787 nose gear collapses

Several Lufthansa employees were injured Thursday after the nose landing gear of a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner collapsed while the aircraft was parked at a gate at Frankfurt Airport.

www.yahoo.com

Title says it all. A Boeing 787 goes down while parked at the gate, smashing a food loading truck.

This is shocking to me because of how powerfully built the 787 landing gear is.

 

[cammerjeff]

While it could be a mechanical failure, the only time I ever saw the nose gear collapse on an airliner was a maintenance failure, the ground control relay circuit breakers were pulled for an unrelated maintenance procedure (simulating an inflight condition) and not reset to normal configuration. The landing gear lock pins were not installed for taxing (another breach of normal operations as it was cold a sleeting at the time) and somehow when pulling into the gate with the B727 the landing gear lever was positioned to up (we never did get a straight answer to why that happened) so with the hydraulic systems pressurized the nose gear retracted. The main gear will not retract as the gears arc would have to lift the aircraft to retract, and the hydraulic system is not strong enough lift even a mostly empty A/C.

It will be interesting to find out what actually happened.

 

[PETERTHEEATER]

I speculate that the locking pin had not been inserted (or inserted incorrectly) into the nose landing gear while a routine maintenance check was being carried out requiring operation of the gear retract lever in the cockpit. This has happened in the past on B727s of other airlines. It was possible to quite easily insert the locking pin in the wrong hole. A modification was issued to blank the incorrect hole but whether it had been incorporated on this plane I don't know.