Well – If I realize at control problem right after rotation or even during rotation, I might forget the gear, especially if I still have at positive rate.

Not so tatin. The Hawker Hunter would quite happily dutch roll on finals (big wing/small fin). In airliners generally though, you would be correct - it has been designed out.

In the first video you can see some form of explosion after lift-off. It's a slightly orange cloud that appears while the aircraft is on full thrust and a few hundred feet off the ground.

Maximum respect to the crew for getting it down in one piece..I think the message to all pilots who have a control malfunction is ,never , never give up..

Not only a case of brown underpants, but they must have filled a few barf bags at the same time....amazing

Good Job!
 

Very good job. the last moments on final before it disappears below the tree line look like its curtains.

At around 33 sec into the video:

if you only look at the right outer wing you can see aileron movements.....

Very bizzare...

I observed the same smoke, but when I played the video again, I observed the same cloud in FRONT of the aircraft = It was a little cloud.

it is a regular SOP for initial test flights, be it a first flight of a new type or after a prolonged storage to leave the gear down. You want to keep things as simple as possible in case of a series of failures...

We used to practice to steer our cessna's with only power and using the doors during initial training (long ago...):ok:

Did the frozen yoke thing in the sim. Great excercise to see the effect of your rudder and to get better rudder-feeling.

At Sabena, one simulator item on Airbus was to land the plane on the runway using rudder/thrust/trim if I remember correctly.(haven't flown the Airbus for 8 years now) it was "fun"...:eek: but had to be successful...

Well, yeah, they had no pitch and roll control according to the videos, so it looks like the guy was stepping on the rudder or using diff-thrust to swing the nose and make the plane pitch down.

Was there an aircraft malfunction confirmed ?

Well, actually, it looks like they were just trying to keep them. Bet they were covered in sweat when that was over. They definitely earned their pay. BIG attaboy to the crew.:ok:
The nose seems to be describing a figure 8 lying on its side. I didn't hear thrust variations on the overflight portion of the video.
Maybe the pitch damper gyro got connected to the yaw damper and vice-versa.
Had to be a maintenance foul up. If a test flight, they would have minimum crew. Do they use a FE on the TU-154? Might have been flopping around too bad to ambulate over to an offending piece of equipment and disable it.

At 0:27 in the first video there is a red flash below the tail. I don't think it's a strobe light.

Congrats to the crew.

Vaguely reminiscent of the Boeing that got airborne in the UK with the ailerons reversed after maintenance. The 'wing-rocking' began well before the small 'flash'.

Actually, if you look at the same videographer's #4 video (not part of this series - a normally operating 154) there is a red strobe under the tail that flashes every so often.

The physical light unit can be seen sticking down aft of the flaps in this still image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...lev_Tu-154.jpg

Some moments before flare and touchdown:

http://s003.radikal.ru/i204/1105/a3/eca06097dc8b.jpg

Left spoiler and aileron up. Wrong angle to be sure of rudder deflection (except it isn't hardover to the right). Is that a partial slat deployment ahead of the R main gear?

Would those parts stay out in the slipstream with a total loss of hydraulic pressure? Would the spoilers be part of manual control reversion in a hydraulic failure?

In a still photo, we can't tell if they are stuck that way or if the pilots were using them intentionally to correct that right bank.

No flaps, but that could be by choice. If the controls are wonky, who wants to deal with a potential split-flap deployment on top of everything else.

For me, comparing with other Tu-154 images,
there is a full left ruder deflection.

While I'm still skeptical as to what actually happened. It almost seems as if the rudder wasn't receiving any control inputs/wasn't attached to its servos whatsoever, the photo before touchdown and video confirm they had ailerons/spoilerons working, and had some form of pitch control. Seems a rudder that is "fluttering" would give this sort of result. A friend had a similar thing happen to him in a Cessna 207 with the elevator trim tab. As he described it: "it shook the **** outta me".

I feel the incident is a little strange:bored:
I did not see any firetrucks at any picture og video:confused:
It seems like braking were normal!

:confused::confused::confused: