Fascinating video shows B-1B bomber crash landing on Dry Lake at Edwards AFB

Feb 26 2014 - 17 Comments
By David Cenciotti

Impressive footage of a B-1B “Lancer” performing a crash landing on lakebed.

The following video was recorded on Oct. 4, 1989.

It shows the successful crash landing of a “Bone” (85-0070) on the surface of Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, where the plane was diverted after an in-flight failure to the #2 hydraulic system prevented it from lowering the nose gear.

 

A dry lake in the vicinity is all you need in case of emergency: the huge lakebed minimized the damage to the plane as the following image shows.

B-1 drylake

Image credit: U.S. Air Force

H/T to Militaryphotos.net forum

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  • R.Lopaka

    Where was the “crash”????

    • crash landing

      • R.Lopaka

        How many were injured or killed? AC destroyed? They jacked up the nose dropped the nose gear fixed the fuse and flew away. Some folks will watch hours of cable news waiting for that pax jet to burn off or bump fuel for the “Emergency Landing”. LOL You’re not in cable news ru?

        • Raptormann

          I worked on the Rockwell North American crew out of Palmdale that did the repair work and sent her home. The damage was surprisingly light.
          A kudos to the flight crew that landed her.

  • sferrin

    Wow, what a coincidence. I post these on milphotos yesterday and they show up here today. I added the C-5 landing to the pages so you’ll want to snag that too.

    • cencio4

      Well, you must have missed the “H/T to Militaryphotos.net forum” at the end of the story…. It’s a credit to who has digged it out.
      Considered the amount of stuff that is “snagged” on the other direction (I mean entire posts and photos taken here and reposted by MP.net users on that forum) I think that a link as the one above is fair enough.

      • sferrin

        I did miss it actually. Apologies.

  • sferrin

    Also, it wasn’t a “crash landing”. The nose gear didn’t deploy, that’s all.

  • FoilHatWearer

    Over the years, the B-1 has had a lot of landing gear problems. When they started flying with full combat loads after Sept. 11th (as opposed to the light training loads during peacetime training), it became obvious that the brakes wouldn’t stop a heavy jet. Lots of brake fires until they were upgraded.

    • William_C_Diaz

      Since the F-15/A-10/F-16 designs, we havent done very well designing aircraft…

      Have a great day!

      • F-22?

        • R.Lopaka

          F-18 EH?

        • AvInsider

          You mean the F-22 that has been grounded close to a dozen times for more than a few serious problems….not the least involving sudden rapid loss of pressure in the pilot’s mask…..

  • Great airmanship

  • AvInsider

    The airframe is not supposed to flex like that but it survived…not much in the air today that could take a sudden load like that so well…

  • R.Lopaka

    Now THIS is a CRASH….landing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApIlK9-5uFk

  • Eric Chevalier

    This video reminds me of an incident on August 27, 1990 when a United Airlines 747-400 landed at LAX with only the outer main gear extended. The inner main wheel assemblies and the nose gear failed to extend. At the time I was working on the 12th floor of an office building on Century Blvd. with a great view of the LAX south runway complex. I had a radio scanner tuned to the various LAX frequencies and was lucky enough to watch and listen to that incident. No significant damage to the plane and there were no injuries. Another example of great piloting!