Sigh...another nose gear bites the dust.

mscard88

mscard88

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Flight school's PA28-140 "experienced" a hard landing today. Busted the NG bushing. This after a 172 was totaled a few months ago due to the same thing.

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Hoping that's all the damage. Concerned about the firewall...

BTW not me or my student before y'all start!
 
People gotta teach the fundamentals and build solid foundations, it's like PIOs, I just don't get how this stuff happens.
 
If he did that, the firewall is toast. I have hard landings sometimes, but idk how the hell people slam them down hard enough to do that
 
James331 said:
People gotta teach the fundamentals and build solid foundations, it's like PIOs, I just don't get how this stuff happens.
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I was watching my student solo today and observed another PA28 bounce, get into a mild PIO, about 3 of 'em, then took off and did a nice landing. Painful to watch!

Edit: heard today 7-1 the pilot is taking her check ride 7-4! Hope she eliminates that PIO crap before then.
 
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No one teaches the ratchet and looking at the infinity point anymore :dunno:
 
Was this the guy who declared he was ready to solo but the instructor wasn't letting him?
 
mscard88 said:
Flight school's PA28-140 "experienced" a hard landing today. Busted the NG bushing. This after a 172 was totaled a few months ago due to the same thing.

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Hoping that's all the damage. Concerned about the firewall...

BTW not me or my student before y'all start!
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Well that sucks. But, it's interesting that there is no pinch flat. Let us know how the firewall fares.
 
Same CFI for the 172 and the 140 ?
 
kayoh190 said:
Why ratchet when you can pump the living s*** out of the yoke!
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And then you get

 
Same old problem: way too much airspeed on arrival at the runway. When will people understand that airspeed and angle of attack are inseparably linked? Too much speed means a low angle of attack, which gives a nose-low attitude, which puts the nosewheel on the runway first, which starts that porpoising that breaks nosegears. Are people afraid of stalling on final or what? Or are they diving at the runway when they find themselves too high? I'm sure more trikes are busted due to too much airspeed than by not enough.
 
Ok I'm having to hard time believing that a hard landing is the primary cause of this failure. I just don't think you could land a plane hard enough to cause that bearing assembly to fail before one of the structural conponents. I think that bushing was ready to go TU long before the poor slob it failed on landed a little hard. The rust around the bore on rim is one telltale for me.
 
James331 said:
No one teaches the ratchet and looking at the infinity point anymore :dunno:
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What's the ratchet? Slowly increasing back pressure? Never heard it put that way., but it works.

Looking at that thing, I'm not convinced a bearing failure wasn't contributory.
 
It does look more like the bearing just shelled itself. It's hard to imagine a landing hard enough to do that without breaking something else first.
 
Although not aviation, I have been in the automotive repair business for 35 years. I have seen about every mode of failure there is and just when I say “well, that couldn’t have happened that way”, I find out, yes it did. I’ll hold my judgement until all the facts are in. (Yes I know this is POA and I am supposed to wildly speculate and call anyone who doesn’t agree me with a lunatic) Right now the only facts I have are, the nose wheel bearing failed and it happened during the landing phase (duh). How hard was it? Don’t know, I wasn’t there. It will be interesting to see what else may be damaged, or not and what the judgment of the shop as to the cause.
 
Sounds like to much solo em when they can take you 3 times around the patch unassisted crap.
 
Mike Smith said:
Although not aviation, I have been in the automotive repair business for 35 years. I have seen about every mode of failure there is and just when I say “well, that couldn’t have happened that way”, I find out, yes it did. I’ll hold my judgement until all the facts are in. (Yes I know this is POA and I am supposed to wildly speculate and call anyone who doesn’t agree me with a lunatic) Right now the only facts I have are, the nose wheel bearing failed and it happened during the landing phase (duh). How hard was it? Don’t know, I wasn’t there. It will be interesting to see what else may be damaged, or not and what the judgment of the shop as to the cause.
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I will jump into the fire and say this probably did not happen during one landing, and it did not have to be a hard landing. It was probably several landings with some side load. And seeing a fairly new tire leads me to believe bearing pre-load might have been off when the wheel was put back together. Also it could have been a cheep bearing. :popcorn::stirpot:
 
Chip Sylverne said:
What's the ratchet? Slowly increasing back pressure? Never heard it put that way., but it works.

Looking at that thing, I'm not convinced a bearing failure wasn't contributory.
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if you act like the yoke has a ratchet in it, you can pull it back but you can't push it back in. one of the tricks to prevent PIO.
 
Zeldman said:
I will jump into the fire and say this probably did not happen during one landing, and it did not have to be a hard landing. It was probably several landings with some side load. And seeing a fairly new tire leads me to believe bearing pre-load might have been off when the wheel was put back together. Also it could have been a cheep bearing. :popcorn::stirpot:
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Cheap bearing? The approved bearings are Timken.
 
Why do some people flying tricycle-gear planes think they are driving a car? Don't they know anything about stall speed? Are they not proficient at stalling an airplane??
 
Jared V said:
Was this the guy who declared he was ready to solo but the instructor wasn't letting him?
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If you were referring to me, to answer your question no this was not me, How presumptuous and ignorant of you to assume that.

Also looking at that one picture how can you definetly blame it on a nose wheel or hard landing (which I have never done BTW) it could have just been the bearings time to fail. If the student did hard land the plane perhaps his instructor failed to teach him correctly as others have stated, poor students are often created from bad instructors.

Either way that one picture does not tell the whole story. In fact if that did happen during a hard landing, how the heck did the "less than capable student" keep from ground looping or crashing the plane???
 
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DaleB said:
It does look more like the bearing just shelled itself. It's hard to imagine a landing hard enough to do that without breaking something else first.
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This... Looks like a lot of corrosion, and very dry from the lack of grease. I would say poor maintenance caused this..
 
I don’t care for the term ratchet in describing a control stick or yoke. To me a ratchet gives you a positive result (turns the fastener) when you turn it one way and no result when turned the other way, but you can still turn it both ways. A control input to the stick will give you a result either way. So I do not understand the meaning of the term in this particular usage.
 
SkyDog58 said:
I don’t care for the term ratchet in describing a control stick or yoke. To me a ratchet gives you a positive result (turns the fastener) when you turn it one way and no result when turned the other way, but you can still turn it both ways. A control input to the stick will give you a result either way. So I do not understand the meaning of the term in this particular usage.
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The ratchet is supposed to be in your head.
 
Dan Thomas said:
Same old problem: way too much airspeed on arrival at the runway. When will people understand that airspeed and angle of attack are inseparably linked? Too much speed means a low angle of attack, which gives a nose-low attitude, which puts the nosewheel on the runway first, which starts that porpoising that breaks nosegears. Are people afraid of stalling on final or what? Or are they diving at the runway when they find themselves too high? I'm sure more trikes are busted due to too much airspeed than by not enough.
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Airspeed has nothing to do with it, I can cross the fence at VNE and never hit the nose wheel or PIO, I might just sail all the way down the runway and never touch down, but I promise you properly trained you wouldn’t touch nosewheel first or even hard.
 
mscard88 said:
Flight school's PA28-140 "experienced" a hard landing today. Busted the NG bushing. This after a 172 was totaled a few months ago due to the same thing.

View attachment 64531

Hoping that's all the damage. Concerned about the firewall...

BTW not me or my student before y'all start!
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Dang, how many planes ya got left?
 
SkyDog58 said:
That makes no sense either.
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Sure it does

When you’re rounding out just over the deck as you slowly ease back on the stick, you can’t put it back forward, if it starts to sink burp in a little power.
 
James331 said:
Airspeed has nothing to do with it, I can cross the fence at VNE and never hit the nose wheel or PIO, I might just sail all the way down the runway and never touch down, but I promise you properly trained you wouldn’t touch nosewheel first or even hard.
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Your post just confirms my statement. You say "...but I promise you properly trained..."

And that's the rub. They're not being taught about airspeed and AoA. They pick a spot on the pavement and they're going to touch down there or else, no matter what speed they're at. Or they float until the end of the runway gets too close and so they force it on, still too fast and therefore too flat. Speed just doesn't matter to them, as long as they have lots of it.

Some taildragger training goes a long ways toward fixing that. Taildraggers won't tolerate sloppiness, and their instructors won't either.
 
James331 said:
Airspeed has nothing to do with it, I can cross the fence at VNE and never hit the nose wheel or PIO, I might just sail all the way down the runway and never touch down, but I promise you properly trained you wouldn’t touch nosewheel first or even hard.
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You aren't a low time student James.

These are training airplanes we are dealing with.

Airspeed has a LOT to do with it when one is in the early stages of learning how to fly and land a plane. The relationship between airspeed, attitude, sink rate and power is one that has to be learned. "Properly trained" is not intuitive to everyone; just like a consistent golf swing it comes with repetition.

Watching students land on the main runway at my airport (from the balcony of the Club with a beer and burger in hand, so I've observed quite a few) I would say too high an approach speed is a very common problem these days. Are students fearful of stalls?

Kinetic energy varies roughly with the square of speed. So even a modestly higher approach speed means a lot more energy that has to be bled off in the landing and roll-out.
 
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