Aeroflot Superjet at Moscow catches fire after touch down

[Gabriel]

Gabriel- You sound a bit too insistent that they should have gone around...lightning fries who-knows-what...maybe you better land the thing...In hindsight...maybe not, but you sound like Evan in your insistence that it was unquestionably called for.

Conceded. Depending how unsafe you judge the plane to fly, you may judge getting the thing on the ground the safest option, even after a 6G nose first 16 ft bounced landing with high pitch excursions. And yes, it is a split-second judgement.

For me one of the keys here is understanding the handling qualities in direct law. Because, under normal conditions, even if you decide not to abort the approach first and then not to abort the landing, at least you don't need to handle the plane in this way. I wonder how much plain bad pilot skill and how much was induced by the direct law response.

[3WE]

Gabieee:
***For me one of the keys here is understanding the handling qualities in direct law.***

Evan has established that the plane feels largely similar in alternate law, and therefore, this cannot be discussed as a potential contributing factor.

I sense that you may have once ridden a bicycle (or even bounced a light aeroplanie) and may not feel exactly that same way.

[Gabriel]

Evan has established that the plane feels largely similar in alternate law, and therefore, this cannot be discussed as a potential contributing factor.

I wonder whether these pilots agree.

I sense that you may have once bounced a light aeroplanie and may not feel exactly that same way.

I did, many times. I even touched down nose-first and the nose bounced up.

But my instructor, who never taught me to seriously consider a go-around as one of the first options in case of bounced landing, did teach me a couple of interesting tricks.
1- When you bounce, keep the nose high, don't try to lower the nose to get the plane back on the ground.
2- To lower the nose you have a couple of methods:
2a- While holding the yoke back from the flare/touchdown, let the nose come down as you lose speed
2b- Lower the nose with the BRAKES, pulling back on the yoke soften the touchdown of the nose wheel (not: this method doesn't work if the plane is still flying: THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT)
2c- Corollary: How NOT to lower the nose? By moving the yoke forward.

[flyboy2548m]

Once again, noted.

[3WE]

Once again, noted.

Flyboy:
Do you recall any specific training on how to avoid and handle bounces, and please briefly describe it.

If Gabriel tries to answer for you, please PM him. [For clarity, there is no change in my status of not_a moderator.]

[flyboy2548m]

Flyboy:
Do you recall any specific training on how to avoid and handle bounces, and please briefly describe it.

Yes, I do. I can describe it as effective.

[3WE]

Flyboy:
Do you recall any specific training on how to avoid and handle bounces, and please briefly describe it.

Yes, I do. I can describe it as effective.

Effective enough that your Russian cousins were grossly negligent?

[ocelot]

A few comments:

-What caused the bad, bouncy landing (and will Evan determine that the crew used improvisation, and botched clear, easy procedures to land safety)?

Still not clear.

I think it is quite clear at least in a big part:

Not disagreeing; but there's still a variety of things we don't know for sure, like what else was broken, whether they thought they were on fire, and in general what informed their decision to not go around -- it seems fairly likely that they thought they couldn't and that continuing the approach was more than just plan continuation bias.

Not hitting the spoilers seems to have been a critical mistake, though, assuming it was a mistake and not that they didn't respond.

-Was the structural design reasonably robust to prevent a big fire and/or was the landing that hard?

It was that hard.

That is a part that is not clear to me. Without the information available, I tend to think that yes, it was hard enough as to cause damage, the destruction of the landing gear, and perhaps some deformations in the fuselage, but it should have been a much more survivable event. The amount of fire during the roll-out (skid) is an indication of not just a breach in the fuel tanks but a total rupture of them end, even then, the fire and/or smoke should not have entered the fuselage so quickly and intensely as to kill more than 50% of its occupant when when an evacuation was initiated immediately and proceeded very quickly. It doesn't seem to have been that hard, and I seriously suspect that it would have ended much better in a Boeing or Airbus.

5-6 Gs is a lot. Also, if the first hard landing broke the main gear, the second one might have been right on the undersurfaces of the wings and significantly deformed the tank structure. I'm not completely convinced. But I also admit that I'm going partly by the historic tendency of Russian planes to be overbuilt, which might or might not apply.

One interesting possibility is that the gear _was_ overbuilt and instead of failing when overstressed ripped chunks of the wings off. There's not really any evidence for this in the available videos, but it's also not clear from any of the ones I've seen what happened to the wheels.

As for fuselage burn-through, given the intensity and volume of the fire I wouldn't expect the structure to hold out for more than a minute or two. Also there's been a persistent rumor (not confirmed but also not exploded that I've heard) that someone opened one of the rear doors and let the fire in.