Air safety: Stress is on landing

Hamburg: Never had the flight safety issue become such a talking point in India than in the last 2-3 months because of several incidents which mainly related to landing gear problems.
Perhaps recognising this as one of the major problems troubling the industry, the Lufthansa Technik (LT) of Germany, one of the world’s major aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) companies, has set up a separate division for landing gears.
LT launched this dedicated product division – called Total Landing Gear Support (TLS) —in 2006. Besides Hamburg, the TLS facilities have been established in Los Angeles, Beijing and London.
These facilities offer one-stop shop for the airlines with the wheel problems.
TLS performed overhaul of 1,000 landing gears (called `legs’ in aviation jargon) which is likely to settle at 2000 per year from 2016 onwards. The next few years are likely to see a jump in landing gear overhauls. Overhaul of landing gears takes four to six weeks.
Referring to questions on India incidents, Kirstein said: “These incidents may be mainly because of the countries to which these aircraft fly... If you fly to Middle-East, the problem of sand and dust could be more than say, flights to Europe and US. Landing gear problems may also occur because of their hitting the runway hard on touchdown, bad condition of runways, corrosion on chrome etc leading to faster overhauls”.
08/06/07 B S Arun/Deccan Herald

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Categories: Foreign Jun 2007, Safety Jun 2007