Watching the news recently I saw a video of an aircraft landing without one of its landing gear fully deployed. Wonderful job by the pilots and crew.

As it turns out, it is not that difficult to find other on-camera examples.

But we know that air travel today is incredibly safe and the statistics support this. So much so that we take for granted the skill exhibited by the engineering community to deliver such high performance from incredibly complex aircraft.

If you travel extensively like I do, I am sure like me you are guilty of not always giving the flight attendants your full attention during the safety briefing such is your confidence in the performance of the aircraft and the team operating it for your flight. So by way of trying to make up for this complacency let me here say a big thank you to everyone involved in designing and producing aircraft and regulating and operating them as they convey millions of us around the globe on a daily basis.

However, this got me thinking about how often this type of landing gear incident actually happens. As it turns out, there are many sources for gathering this type of data. I looked at one report from Boeing that gave a statistical summary of commercial jet airplane accidents worldwide between 1959 and 2013. One thing that stands out above all is the dramatic increase in safety, as measured by the number of accidents, that has occurred in this time period. This is even more remarkable when, according to the report, in 2013 there were a total of over 25 million departures by over 22,000 aircraft greater than 60,000 pounds maximum gross weight. Of these 25 million departures and hence landings, in 2013, the report identifies just 31 accidents. No wonder we take things for granted and if you are a nervous about flying hopefully this is some comfort to you.

In terms of the videos showing the landing gear failure, it turns out that of these 31 accidents, about 20% of them involved a landing gear failure that resulted in substantial damage to the aircraft but fortunately no fatalities.

As a traveler, I think we take for granted the landing gear and assume it to be a relatively straightforward system considering the complexity of the aircraft as a whole and what else our minds tell us could potentially go wrong. So maybe this number strikes us as being a little higher than we might expect. Our talented engineering team recently demonstrated in a very visual way, the landing gear is a highly complex system.

Not only must it be able to withstand the aircraft weight and manage the impact load during landing, other design considerations include its aerodynamic performance and effect on the aircraft when deployed, the noise it generates that may affect the surrounding environment, the aeroelastic effects on the doors when open and the safe software controlled actuation and articulation of the mechanism in as small a space as possible. With an increasing focus on weight reduction and reliability, new materials are being introduced along with electro-mechanical components. Compounding this is the fact that the landing gear must be sufficiently durable to go through many landings between maintenance cycles.

So the next time I board a plane, particularly if climbing the stairs from the ground, I will be sure to take a much closer look at the landing gear and think about the multi-disciplinary design process that the engineering teams have gone through to develop an incredibly safe and reliable system and all the challenges they are now facing to develop the next generation of landing gear. I will also thank them for enabling me to sit back and relax and be asleep before take off.

For more information on how ANSYS solutions can create complete virtual prototypes to explore the complex design trade space for landing gear systems please visit:

Virtual Prototyping for Aircraft Landing Gear System Design

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