SXF runway blocked
 

A Global 5000 of German Air Force returned to SXF after encounting technical malfunction. During landing both wingtips had ground contact.

https://twitter.com/berlinairport?s=09

Airport closure deleted some minutes ago

skadi

"Both wingtips"....


Jeeez

Always check thoroughly and twice when taking an aircraft off maintenance !,:hmm: That said the GAF has a long history of these mishaps with their VIP transport fleet. Maybe time to stop the strict military approach and copy the French system which operates a similar scheme with the ETEC/Esterel squadron since years and which is run to much higher standards ( and also make much more flying hours)

Ah, the glorious German Luftwaffe...

Sorry, could not resist. Our Air Force keeps making headlines with malfunctions, delays and other embarassments. Time and again members of the German government are late for their appointments or stuck somewhere because the old junkyard we call "Flugbereitschaft" just won't fly. Recently, Chancellor Merkel had to fly on a regular line service to attend G-20 in Brasil. (I suspect they put her in Business, but still, normal people around ... :}).

The Bombardier Global 5000 that caused this mess isn't that old, though. Flugbereitschaft operates four aircraft of this type, the first went into service around 2011. According to a Luftwaffe spokesman, the aircraft was in SXF for some maintenance work and scheduled to return to its base in CGN. Because of some yet unspecified malfunction after take-off, the crew decided to return to SXF. On landing, the aircraft "touched ground with both wings", the spokesman is being quoted.

Incident happened around 09:00 local time. The aircraft blocked the runway for a couple of hours. SXF was closed, incoming traffic diverted to TXL. As of this noon, operations in SXF are slowly returning back to normal. Lots of people queuing, though, as it's Easter vacation time in Berlin. The crew is being medically treated, but it is not clear whether anybody has been injured. No passengers on the flight, obviously.

This one is said to have been at Bombardier at Schönefeld for maintenance right before the flight. They had flight control issues especially concerning roll control. Touchdown is said to have happened in the grass on roll out they exited the runway to both sides hitting both wingtips.

Here are two pictures of the landing in SXF. Not much fun obviously...
https://www.aerotelegraph.com/pannen...rt-schoenefeld

This is the kind of "Seconds to disaster". This is a screenshot from www.aerotelegraph.com
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5d55751bdd.png
German Global 5000 Air Force

I find the angle hard to confirm from the photo but it looks like the right wing roll spoilers are working in reverse to the left wing aileron.

Didn't this happen recently to an Embraer somewhere in Spain?

The RH wing spoilerons are UP. The LH wing aileron is I believe DOWN i.e. in agreement with the spoilerons - both are acting to roll the aircraft right wing down.

The LH aileron looks T/E "UP" if you compare to the adjacent flap, but on landing the flaps should be at 30, so the aileron can be quite far TE down and still be "UP" compared to the flap. Looking at the outboard end of the aileron, where the reference wing section is fixed, I think it looks TE down.

YMMV, of course.

Yes, both photos which show spoilers and ailerons are pretty clear: Ailerons and rudder point in the correct direction, spoilers wrong.

But it also means that either the pilots at that point were applying reversed aileron input at that point on purpose, or in this case it was the *spoilers* (all of them) which were hooked up the wrong way (as opposed to the *ailerons* which were messed up in the Embraer case, at least according to the picture that was making the rounds). Which seems even harder to do than the aileron swap. But maybe someone familiar with the setup in the Bombardier knows how the connectors work...

Press conference
 

Video of press conference here:
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschl...-Unglueck.html

Are there any German speakers who can provide the gist of what's being said?

Yikes. AFP quotes Luftwaffe spokesperson: "The jet touched the ground with both wings and a controlled landing was no longer possible."

Pretty clear that a controlled landing was "no longer possible" before both wings touched the ground.

Well done, the crew. Hope they are all OK.

Okay, I try my very best.
Facts from the press conference in Berlin today

The most important facts presented at the press conference:
- Shortly after takeoff (8.40 Local time) the crew reported trouble with the flight controls
- After working the related emergency checklists and procedures the crew decided to return to the airport (SXF)
- During landing recurrent „uncontrollable movements“ and trouble for the crew to controll the aircraft
- 9.07 LT: During emergency landing a/c damaged because both wings came in contact with the ground
- Crew: 2 pilots and 1 female cabin crew
- The captain/commander: 7400 flight hours and licensed flight instructor
- All Crew are being medically checked „as a precaution“ in a Berlin military hospital; obviously "no physical injuries".
- The aircraft was delivered in 2011 and underwent „a routine maintenance“ after 30 months of flight services at „Lufthansa Bombardier Aviation Services“ in SXF. Has been there since March, 20th. It was the first flight since.
- Aircraft is being examined and Flight data recorder will be read out.
- No further information about former or actual damages oft the a/c.
Seems as if the Luftwaffe isn´t glad about the results of the maintenance...

One entertaining fact from the press conference was that the plan was to ferry (crew only) the aircraft to Cologne only to ferry it back to Berlin again the day after in order to bring the German President to Stuttgart.

I bet that the Greens in the German parliament are already climbing the walls on this issue - and I'm struggling to disagree with them.

Is it by the way normal that a fairly new aircraft is in "routine maintenance" for more than three weeks, and that the first flight after such a (long?) stay is a ferry flight?

I understand that a jet isn't a 172, but after maintenance isn't there something along the lines of 'flight controls free *and correct*' ?

Flight Control Synoptic page
 

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....be4c615223.png
Global Express/XRS Flight control synoptic page

After engine start, the flight controls are cycled through their range of movement and this is monitored on the synoptic page. The flight controls themselves can't be seen from the cockpit. I would suggest that it's human nature to assume all is well and you are looking at the range of movement indicated, not actually comparing the direction of movement of the multi-function spoilers to the ailerons. I can't recall if the FCOM (or equivalent) called for the checking of the roll function of the spoilers specifically or simply a check of whether they extended manually and "automatically" (weight on wheels). If you look at the diagram above, it has a top section and a bottom section. One tends to look at the bottom section when checking the primary controls and then the top section when you move on to the spoiler check. You therefore may not notice the asymmetry. I have seen pilots who come off the G-IV do the spoiler roll check out of habit, as the G-IV had a reasonably detailed ground spoiler check in the after start checklist.

This would have been an extremely confusing event for the pilots. With initial roll input, all would have worked correctly. Increasing the roll input, thereby activating the roll spoilers, would have reversed the desired result, which would trigger your muscle memory to further increase the roll input, again accelerating the error. Near the ground, it would take a quick thinking and brave individual to try reversing the roll input, potentially making the situation worse.

The crew did have a chance to trap the maintenance error in the after start checklist but this is yet another classic Human Factors incident with plenty of learning lessons. I'm glad the crew are ok. They did a good job recovering the aircraft.

You remember Volker Rühe, Secretary of defense - same issue, Chopper flying from EDDK to to EDDH to get the gentlemen IIRC from the airport to his living quarters on a Friday, chopper ferried back to EDDK only to go back on Monday morning. Or the Challenger that turned around on the Azores fuel stop, which was intended to pax around Misses Künast and Mr.Trittin in Brasilia, because Brasil has no good enough private planes. Both from the green party.

A very good instructor gave me this tip years ago - If roll control appears to be reversed, let go of the control yoke and just use rudder for secondary effects and then (if the design allows) hold the part of the control that emerges from the dashboard or floor for pitch attitude. Have tried this in light aircraft and it works well.

Die Zeit
Deepl.com translation

The Luftwaffe announced that the Global 5000 business jet had serious control problems shortly after take-off at 08.40 a.m.. During the landing, the plane had scraped the ground with both wings. The air force crew had managed to "bring the jet to the ground under the most difficult conditions and thus prevent something worse from happening", explained Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU). The plane should have brought Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to Stuttgart on Wednesday.

According to the Luftwaffe, the aircraft was just on its way back to Cologne for a 30-month check-up in one of the manufacturer's workshops in Schönefeld when a malfunction was reported. There had been uncontrolled flight movements, which the crew had not entered, said Commander Fliegende Gruppe der Flugbereitschaft, Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Schipke, at the airport. Two pilots and a flight attendant were on board. After landing, they were taken to a Bundeswehr hospital, but remained physically unharmed.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Spoilers left in maintenance mode? Happened on an A320 many years ago in the UK. One left in maintenance mode was enough to cause severy control difficulties. Crew did not realize during pre flight checks, it remained stowed, and once in the air, spoiler deployed with the vacuum created above the wing.

A young spotter witnessed this, Spiegel Online has more pictures here. Not looking good.

In the video, the witness says that he saw the aircraft on approach trying to compensate for violent roll and yaw, effectively overcompensating: "It was like a roller coaster, going sideways and up and down. Then it touched down after a while I'd been thinking they would have had to go around. And I've seen dust being blown up on landing. It stopped at the end of the runway and fire engines and ambulances came to the scene."

I asked my Trg Mgr years ago why the sim could not be/was not programmed with incorrect flt ctl response to the pre take off flt ctl check. No answer!
To my knowledge, it has happened twice to A320s post maintenance with, happily, no casualties but lots of red faces.
This could be another incident which might have been picked up before take off - we must wait and see.
Cheers,
mcdhu

I mentioned this in the Embraer thread: if your roll control is reversed, lean over and grab the FO's inboard control column horn with your right hand and your inboard horn with your left and away you go. Wouldn't work in this case though if the spoilers were reversed. And good luck doing it in an Airbus... come to think of it, does a Glex have a control column??

One was a Lufthansa about 10 years ago. Apparently, only the wiring of the Captain' s side stick were reversed.

To me it looks LH aileron up, RH spoilers up.......
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....a9a84026e4.jpg

Does this display show what has been asked for, or what is actually happening?

Super VC-10, That is a most erudite question. To cut to the quick, I don’t know in definitive terms, but having said that, surely the synoptic would be useless if it did not show the result, rather than the request?

Having said that, I do recall being told that some of the valve positions on the bleed air page could be misleading, but in this day and age of "you don't need to know that", it was never expanded upon.

As the aircraft is intact, all should be revealed in the near future.

Was that an Excalibur A320?

Could they have made that display any more complicated/difficult to understand??

Yep, Excalibur A320

What is so complicated about that display?