Type Has History Of Nosewheel-Askew Landings

Officials from the NTSB are investigating why a Northwest Airlines Airbus A320 recently landed in North Dakota with its nose gear pointed in the wrong direction.

Witnesses said the landing gear caught fire as the jet slid to a stop October 20 with its front gear twisted at a 90-degree angle. No one was hurt. The plane carried 134 passengers and a crew of four from Minneapolis to Fargo, according to the Associated Press.

Damage to the aircraft was limited to the nose gear, which has been removed and replaced, according to Northwest officials. The airline said the plane is expected to return to service in the coming days and will return to Minneapolis-St. Paul "on a non-revenue flight first to ensure that all systems are operational."

"The crew had some indications of some faults during the flight and they went through their troubleshooting procedures, did what they could do," said Pam Sullivan, of the National Transportation Safety Board office in Chicago.

It was not the first such nose gear incident involving that type of aircraft, Sullivan said. "We're still trying to determine exactly what the reasoning was behind this one," she said. "There have been several of them, but there hasn't been a single cause of all the other ones, so we're trying to find out exactly what went wrong in this case."

Twisted nosegears seem to be a curious mechanical quirk of the A320 family; there have been approximately seven reported incidents of A320-family planes landing with nosewheels askew, including the dramatic (some would say over-hyped -- Ed.) televised emergency landing of JetBlue Flight 292 at LAX in September 2005.

As ANN reported, that incident led the FAA and CASA to issue airworthiness directives on A320 nosegear assemblies.

Northwest said the NTSB investigation is ongoing and it is "premature to speculate on what caused the landing gear to fail" in this latest incident.

FMI: www.nwa.com, www.ntsb.com