Even though wheels aren’t essential to the actual aerial part of an airline flight, it’s generally not great when one of the landing gear wheels shoots sparks everywhere and then, um, falls off. Which is exactly what happened on an Air Canada Jazz flight from Montreal to Bagotville in a small Dash 8-300 commuter plane. Nobody was hurt, just so you know.
A passenger named Tom Van-Aken happened to be in a seat with a great view of the landing gear during takeoff, and shot this rather alarming video:
Yeah, that’s not great.
The Dash 8-300 has three landing gear assemblies, each with two wheels, and after circling around for about two hours, the 49-passenger aircraft returned to Montreal to land, which the pilot was able to pull off, sans the missing wheel, without incident.
Yikes, right?
DISCUSSION
The logic here doesn’t make sense. Why don’t they just continue on their journey and worry about it when they land? I mean, what’s the use of circling for 2 hrs, disrupting everyone’s travel plans when they have to land somewhere anyways? If it was a part critical to the safety of the flight, by all means, return and land asap but if it’s related to landing...it doesn’t matter where you land, so might as well land at your destination, amirite???