Incident in FAO 22/6/04

[EGCC24L]

Just been informed that there has been some kind of incident in FAO and runway 10/28 is now closed ufn. Flights are currently diverting to SVQ and LIS. Dont know what aircraft it was but it involved an aborted take off and there are no injuries.

[CargoOne]

Aircraft is a longhaul narrowbody Ilyushin 62M, operated by airwing of Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations (huh....).

Operated the football charter out of FAO with Russian fans, got the "rudder failure" indication on takeoff roll, aborted takeoff and ended on the grass. 86 pax onboard, no injuries.

[Airbus Girl]

Apparently the Russians aren't too popular at Faro. That incident shut the airport for 5 hours. In another recent incident a Russian aircraft managed to blow away part of the ILS system before it was quite up and running..... And the agents at Faro have a nightmare because none of their pilots speaks any other language other than the basic aviation required words in English.
Still, at least no one was hurt....
And why do they have so many wheels on their aircraft????

[gashcan]

Someone told me (a long long time ago...) that the reason that they have so many wheels on their aircraft is that at the time of manufacture, they didn't possess the rubber / tyre technology to make big ones! Whether that's true or false....I know not, but it sounds a good story!

[GrazingIncidence]

And I was told that it was becasue at the time of design there was a need to keep load per wheel down to a value which inadequate/incomplete runway surfaces could cope with.

I wonder who's right?

[CargoOne]

Most of Russian aircraft have a lot of wheels for a very simple reason: they need to keep ACN as low as practically possible due to lack of runways with high PCN in Russia. Check Jepps and you will be surprised that MD80 is no-go to most Russian airports excluding major ones.