Landing Gear Retraction

[flapsupdown]

My understanding is that in most/all modern jets, when the gear lever is selected up, braking is automatically applied to stop gear rotation.

How is this achieved in the forward landing gear where there is no brake system?

[Tomescu]

There are two pads. When the nose gear is retracted, the wheels are touching the pads and they slow down.

[EW73]

These two 'pads', called snubbers, are sorta like rubber blocks that are attached to the roof of the nose wheel well.
When the NLG spinning wheels come into contact with these snubbers, at about the same time as the uplock is engaged, the wheels are quickly brought to a stop.
That is, except for the B727, a wonderful airplane, where there are NLG brakes fitted (in most cases), and therefore no snubbers are required.

EW73 :ok:

[MarkerInbound]

You'll find a few 727s with NLG brakes these days. (Probably more correct to say you'll only find a few 727s these days.) But even in it's heyday, most 727s didn't have NLG brakes. Since you had to be more than 50% into the brakes before the NLG brakes kicked in they didn't see that much use. Plus they added dead weight that the airlines looked at as an extra passenger. So most airlines didn't order them or removed them and put the snubber strips in. You could tell when the snubbers were worn down because you'd hear the wheel spinning down under your seat after retraction.

In 13 years flying 13 dash numbers I never flew one with NLG brakes installed. Now I run across one every once in a while in a VIP configuration with the nose brakes because they have W&B issues and tend to carry them as ballast.

[Yobbo]

DC-4 had snubbers, you could smell the burnt rubber after gear retraction.

[flapsupdown]

Thanks for the answers!