From slot above:
... flight crew in an incident or accident have a human tendency to believe things are not as bad . . . the assumption is: It can't be that bad -- lets work through . . .
In other threads there are
records of the INVESTIGATOR-err, due to the investigators' mistaken mental-model [false narrative, erroneous hypothesis, patriotic-protectionism]. And most recently at USA's CSB:
In various cases of smoke-fire (on ground and inflight), the pilots' mistaken mental-model (from the misleading smoke-stream) took pilots to the WRONG CHECKLIST (Electrical Fire _v_ Cargo Smoke).
Since this thread is about a mishap at LGA, & other comments about that earlier B737 Nose Landing Gear failure at LGA:
There were two cases during the summer of 1964, where the mishap-pilots' misperceived a MLG separation (mistakenly as a tire-failure, or nothing-at-all).
Northeast Airlines 715 / 5Jun64 DC-6B, N8221H, approach to LGA Rwy31 impacted dike prior to threshold; Rt MLG separated. . . . CAB's AAR pg-3:
As the aircraft passed over the water retaining dike located ahead of the runway threshold a "thump" was heard or felt by the crew. With regard to this occurrence, the captain stated,
" . . . there was no change of any sort other than the thump, either the sound or the feeling -- I believe it was feeling probably more than sound . . . I was aware that the aircraft had struck something. I was quite surprised, and the first officer made the statement that,
'I think we might have blown a tire'
. . . after we were in what I was considering the landing, and I thought the gear was still with us . . . "
And two months later:
TWA91 / 26Aug64 B707-331C N787TW, Capt Hogan, landing Kansas City downtown, MKC, Both MLG sheared off by impact with Dike…. This case was reviewed regularly during recurrent training for decades after:
those mishap-pilots attempted to taxi their B707, not realizing that their airliner was belly-on-the-concrete.
Various instructors would recite the old story: The pilots didn’t begin to recognize the real problem until passengers had exited, then around to the cockpit side-window … No AAR(an “incident”). No details about the post accident misperceptions (unaware MLG had separated).
[
UMKC archives, Box 157 (index on p36), Folder, Incident – August 26, 1964 (1), and (2), Kansas City, MO –- FLT 91 Capt. Hogan.]