http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone...air-force-base
The C-5 is a flying warehouse of an aircraft, but with all its lifting capacity
comes high complexity and the type is certainly known for its fair share of
chronic issues. On a week when the last upgraded C-5M was announced delivered, a
video showing a Galaxy making an incredibly well-flown nose gear up landing at
Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas has come to light.
It's not clear if the video, which was first posted on John Q. Public's Facebook
page, was shot recently or on March 15th, 2018 when a known nose gear up landing
by as C-5 occurred at the base, but the latter is probably the case. Nobody was
hurt in that incident and the aircraft was deemed repairable, but it marked
another in a very long line of issues with Galaxy's troublesome landing gear
which has included many emergency landings. In the Summer of 2017, two C-5s from
Dover Air Force Base had similar issues in Rota, Spain which resulted in the
grounding of the USAF's truncated force of just 56 C-5s.
The C-5's long history of landing gear issues includes the aircraft's issues to
rise again after its nose gear 'kneels' to accept cargo through the jet's giant
tilting nosecone door. I have had more than one C-5 crewmen tell me that the
chances of the jet's nose gear lifting as advertised basically a coin toss. This
is in addition to the myriad of other issues that impact the aircraft's
reliability, many of which were supposed to be solved by the C-5M upgrade,
although large increases in availability have not materialized as expected.
Regardless of the details surrounding this nose gear up landing, the crew did an
amazing job of keeping the nose off the ground as long as possible and thus
keeping the jet, the surrounding infrastructure and their own souls intact. You
can read all about what it is like to pilot the C-5 in this past feature of
mine.
We are reaching out to Lackland AFB for comment and will update this post when
we find out any more information about the video.
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