How not to land a fighter jet

Landing a fast, single-seat jet fighter takes no little amount of skill. A fighter jet like the F-16 touches down at around 300km/h (186mph) – a speed that gives its pilot very little time to react if anything goes wrong.

And things certainly do go wrong. A video from 2014, which has gone viral via Reddit’s aviation forum this week, shows a Russian Air Force Sukhoi Su-35 make a landing during an airshow in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian far east last August.

The Su-35 first makes a hard banking turn to the right very close to the runway, before landing. However, the force of the landing bounces the aircraft, causing a dramatic loss of speed. The left wing stalls, and for one terrifying moment the left wingtip drags along the ground before the pilot – or the computers which help control the aircraft – manage to save the day.

The Su-35 is one of the most advanced aircraft in the Russian Air Force, a heavy supersonic fighter that is more than 70ft long and can weigh as much as 35 tonnes when in the air. Powered by two Saturn engines that can deliver up to 31,000lbs of thrust each, it’s a large but very manoeuvrable aircraft.

Su-35s have proved a popular draw at airshows, thanks to the engines’ ability to direct its thrust at different angles (in aviation terms, known as thrust-vectoring) which allow the aircraft to fly at almost impossible angles.

When it comes to landing however, groundbreaking aerodynamics only count for so much. A pilot landing his plane at nearly 300km/h still has to have lightning-fast reflexes to prevent disaster – either by trying to correct a potentially disastrous manoeuvre, or if it’s too late, ejecting out of a soon-to-be doomed aircraft.

BBC Future spoke to one former RAF fast jet pilot and instructor, Graham Flack, who viewed the video. "I do not think any quick reactions were involved in saving the situation – he or she was fortunate that the aircraft bounced the way it did and maybe the aircraft's computer would have been working overtime to help correct the situation,” he says. "It is not a good idea to bounce a fast jet on landing!”

The problems, he says, began because the aircraft was far too close to the runway when it started its landing descent. "Ideally you should have lined up straight with the runway by 300ft above the ground and the pilot was well below this. The late roll out [where the aircraft gradually loses speed just above the runway] has given the pilot very little time to realise the rate of descent was too high.” When the plane hit the runway the deceleration was so dramatic there was not enough speed and lift to stop the left wing stalling – and there is very little a pilot or computer control system can do once this happens.

(BBC)