17 years without a license

We begin with bad news, unfortunately.

We always do.

Generally, yeah, we do.

But this time, thankfully, well, unfortunately, people got hurt, but thankfully not very seriously as far as we know at the moment.

But a Lufthansa Boeing 787-9 was preparing to depart Frankfurt for Los Angeles when at the gate the nose gear decided it would no longer be extended.

It opted out.

It opted out of extension.

It became retracted.

We don't know yet why the gear retracted, collapsed, folded, whatever you wanna use at the moment, because we don't know exactly what happened yet.

This was Delta Alpha Bravo Papa Quebec, and it was positioned at stand A15 preparing for flight LH450 to Los Angeles.

There were ground crew and flight crew on board the aircraft at the time of the incident.

Lufthansa says that several people sustained minor injuries, and at least two people sustained serious injuries, and multiple people were taken to hospital for evaluation.

The aircraft sustained significant damage to the nose area, as well as some other areas.

Thankfully, as far as extremely, extremely expensive and difficult repairs, the front door seems to have been closed.

The L1 door-

Oh, that's, that's nice

... that was at the jet bridge appears to have been closed.

Yeah.

There's a couple other interesting points here.

The extended video shows, most of the videos people have seen, and then we even have in the blog, only show the immediate moments before the gear collapse.

But the longer version of the video actually shows the doors opening up before the nose wheel retracts into the bay, indicating that for whatever reason, whether it was commanded to retract the nose gear or whatever else, it wasn't just that the gear gave out and collapsed into the wheel well.

It seems to have been doing the normal thing, the normal actuation that the nose gear does, which is very, very interesting.

Whether that was due to some maintenance procedure that was going on or whatever other reason, it wasn't simply that the nose gear gave out.

It looks like it was commanded to or either decided to do it for whatever reason.

And Ian, you speak of, thankfully, the damage could be worse.