This morning at 10 I was sitting in my aircraft, inside the hangar, trying to invent a better holder for my GoPro. The hangar door was half open, so I could see the airfield. I hear a light airplane arrive, typical Rotax sound, I look up and see an Aquila coming in hot. Touches down hard, jumps and at the second touch down the nose gear breaks … What an ugly sound that is. Helped the guy, from a nearby club, get the airplane off the runway.
It was already very hot at 10 (+30 degrees in the shade) and it looked like he was surprised by the strong ground effect created by the hot air above the runway, the touched down hard with a high groundspeed, jumped and obviously tried to push down the airplane onto the runway … Too bad, what a nice airplane. Should be insured well though as a club plane …
Every landing you can walk away from is a good landing :)
That’s what I told the pilot, an elder gentleman too. “Don’t worry about it, the hardware can be fixed”. The only thing he said was: “I have never done that before”.
If anybody ever asks again why flying schools still mainly use 30 year old Cessna 152s running on the 7th engine then show him these pictures 
I don’t think anyone was ever able to actually break the nose gear of a C150. Bend it a little maybe. But break it off like that? No way!
Yes; it is incredibly flimsy. Looks like 1.5mm.
It was the THIRD time I watched a crash, at home. A gear up landing of a 182 (that sound was bad too…) and unfortunately a fatal glider crash on takeoff (with the winch)… that was very sad.
That reminds me of a crazy story ….
And then I saw a really fascinating crash in 1995, one day before I became editor of a German flight magazine. I had just crawled out of my Warrior at the EDNR (Regensburg) airport and walked twds the restaurant and little tower when I see a Comander 114 on short final – with the gear still up. The prop was ONE meter above the ground when the pilot realized it and pushed the throttle forward, with full flaps and at minimum speed. He losz control of the airplane immediately and flew right INTO A HANGAR. It was one of those big silver metal hangars with a large aluminum door. There was loud bang, the complete hangar door flew twds the runway and there was a big cloud of dust.
When it settled we only saw (there was a friend with me) only a black holde where the door was … complete silence. We were completely shocked, because we were sure that we had witnessed a fatal accident. Nobody moved for seconds … we expected an explosion! A minute later two guys WALK out of the hangar, over to the little beergarden. One of them was wearing a black business suit, I remember and had a mobile phone in his hand. They sat down at a table, as if they had just arrived by car, and the guy dials a number and goes: “All fine baby, … well the bird is dead, but we are fine!”. He had a small cut on his forehead…
We walked over to the hangar. 20 feet inside the hangar there was a BALL of aluminum that once was a Comander 114, about five feet from a (we later learned) Cessna 340 with full tanks. The big aluminum hangar door seems to have destroyed most of the energy and they missed the main beam above the door by about one meter probably. Since I was ALWAYS carrying a camera I made a photor of the scene inside the hangar … it was in the magazine the next month. Will post it when I find it later …
PS: Yes, I was astonished how cheap the construction of the NLG is … just thin sheet metal …
There is a version of the Aquila with a double nose gear, targeting training.
The damage is quite small compared to traditional aircraft. The propeller can be repaired, the nose gear replaced and the Rotax gearbox costs a fraction of the whole engine.
I thought about that too. What’s your estimate? € 30 K? No engine shockloading?
The damage is quite small compared to traditional aircraft. The propeller can be repaired, the nose gear replaced and the Rotax gearbox costs a fraction of the whole engine.
True but you probably can’t repair it on-site, so you need to add in the cost of getting it back from some inconvenient place. If this happened on a Greek island (and I have one such pic from Samos) the plane might be written off.
