A380 - Landing gear problem

[Cam]

I was watching the A380 program on the Disco channel with Travolta. They were going over the final checks before the plane was handed over to the Flight Test department. They were testing the landing gear in the hangar and the right gear would get stuck on the door (a piece of metal actually). The engineers coated the piece of metal with teflon paint in the hopes that it would let the gear slide down.

In the end, it still got stuck but for not the length of time that it did initially without the coating. They let it pass with the footnote that it would probably shake loose with the air stream on landing.

Now I think they were testing the emergency deployment of the gear rather than the regular. I hope that this is not something they will put into production of the plane. It seems very armature if they did and just left the problem as is.

Does anyone have any more insight or has seen the program on Discovery?

[Tanner_J]

Are you serious?

[Cam]

Are you serious?

Yes

[Tanner_J]

If it's the same thing I've seen it is old. Do you really think with a plane of that much stature and media coverage that they wouldn't come up with a solution?

[Cam]

I know the program was a repeat. But I wanted to know if there were any new developments on if it had been fixed. They did state that they were going to continue to work on it. So I will assume that they fixed it, but I would like to know for sure.

This may have been for the test flight.

[Tanner_J]

Considering it's in commercial service and if it posed a threat to the aircraft, then it was fixed. Simple as that. They would not air it on a television show if it was a serious threat in the first place.

[ptbodale]

I saw the programme as well Cam. We talked about it at work.

The problem was the gear "catching" on the gear door and the gear would "hesitate" before droppping and there were instances where the gear would not drop. The did use teflon and delayed turning the acft for service. The engineers had to decide if this was a problem that was happening only in the hangar or would the rush of the wind as the gear was dropped actually negate the problem.

[Cam]

Yea, I was wondering if anyone had an update on weather it was resolved from an engineering point or if it turned out to be just a problem that resolved itself.

No one knows.

[ptbodale]

Well as the show mentioned the acft could not be turned over to flt ops until the engineers were satisfied that the fix would solve the problem.