If a jetliner loses its' jets, can i glide so safety? That is i it has somewhere to land.?

Answer 1

Yes it can, and it has happened a few times.

Compare it to riding a bicycle, then stopping pedalling. The bicycle and the airplane both stay "up" because of their forward motion. Either will slow down if you stop powering them, but if you are going downhill, you can coast a long way. The pilot's task, as you pointed out, is to find somewhere to coast downhill to. Engines do not hold an airplane up, they just propel it forward. The gravity that the mistaken "no" commenter referred to can provide that forward force.

An Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel and landed safely in Gimli, Manitoba. It's known as the Gimli Glider.

An Air Transat Airbus 330 had a malfunction that resulted in all the fuel being pumped out of the wing, but landed safely in the Azores.

A British Airways Boeing 747 lost all four engines due to volcanic ash ingestion and was gliding, but the crew succeeded in restoring engine power, so it was not forced to glide all the way to land.

There are some links below describing these incidents, but you can find more by searching on the flight numbers.

Answer 2

Every airplane has a glide ratio -- varying from 1:1 with the Space Shuttle to between 15:1 and 20:1 for most airliners. A glide ratio of 15:1 (your typical 747) simply means that it can glide 15 miles for each mile of altitide without engine power. That's about 100 miles at typical cruise altitude.

Every Space Shuttle mission ends with an unpowered glide back to earth and that's with its terrible glide ratio. Any pilot with any skill can land virtually any aircraft without engines and it's been done many times.

OK, time for full disclosure as some old-head fighter-jock will probably chime in about the F-4 having a 'negative' glide ratio. The F-4 emergency procedures checklist for a dual engine flameout is one word: Eject! But since we don't use F-4s for passenger flights that's not a worry.

Answer 3

All aircraft have lifting surfaces, ansd there are some pretty good physics lessons you need to know, so you can fly them.

Any airplane glides. A glide is a fall that is directed forward, in the normal flight attitude.

A real glider falls one foot for every 20 to 30 it moves forward. It uses hot rising air to attain altitude, after being initially launched.

As a former pilot, I can assure you that the entire panorama of land for about ten to twenty miles out is constantly mapped during my flights, both on the computers, and manually, by all crew.

Our eyes look for flat smooth 'diversionary fields' upon which we can set down safely, in our scan of the instruments, the airspace around us, then the ground, and back to the instruments. We have a 'heads up' rule so we don't collide in the air with any other plane.

That is why aviation is 1000 times safer than driving a motor vehicle, even though there are lots more 'gotchas' in the air!.

Just like you should be doing when you drive your motorcycle, or car. You look ahead, most, then, at the instruments for a glance, and then a rear view mirror check, and it all happens every 5 seconds, if you were trained correctly!

You assess hazards, like the driveway up ahead on the right, with the tail of a car, that has a small plume of exhaust on a cool day.

You just KNOW that the person will back out soon, right into your path. You slow, hover your hand and foot over the brakes, while getting ready to stab the horn with your thumb.

PLUS, you look to steering out of the way, check for on-coming traffic, and spot the 'escape' lanes of possibly driving up onto the opposite sidewalk, if needed!

A large aircraft might have a glide ratio of 11 to 1, 11 feet forward, for 1 foot of fall. With Full flalr (full flaps), 11 miles of glide for one mile of altitude... but, it is sacrificed in any turns or maneuvers!

Answer 4

The plane can land but the aircraft has to have a great deal of speed to keep from stalling. The loss of all power would have the aircraft descending at a lot faster rate than one with power. The rate of descending would be fast and then when close to the ground the speed would be fast enough to allow to pull the nose up and set down. No room for error, since the glide path will not allow room to maneuver much to each side. It would be interesting to have a pilot that fly this type of aircraft to post on here. I would think that there would be a loss of controls with no power unless the controls operate off of a diffrent power system.

Answer 5

every airplane has a "glide ratio" by design, this means that at a pre-determined airspeed computed at gross weight the aircraft will lose so many feet of altitude vertically for every so many feet traveled horizontally. This means that the distance capable in glide to a safe landing is determined by the altitude of the aircraft at the time power was lost. Many contributing factors also exist such as aircraft configuration (gear, flap, spoiler etc. drag inducing items) a rule of thumb has long been accepted that if you imagine an extended line on a 45 degree angle to the ground 360 degrees around the aircraft that this is your potential safe zone. Anything outside that zone is probably not within your power off gliding range. As you can imagine in an aircraft with a high sink rate this zone as determined by the pilots eye will rapidly diminish.Even a brick tossed through the air will move forward as it losses altitude as long as there is forward speed involved "speed is your friend".

Answer 6

It can glide until it drops below "stall speed" When the weight of the plane overcomes the forward motion. Because they are huge and heavy they have a higher stall speed. The pilot knows the stall speed so he will put it into a dive to keep the speed up. The problem would be an emergency landing at high speed is usually called an airline disaster.
And it's called reverse thrusters the engines don't suddenly reverse direction. They would explode. The thrusters direct the exhaust. Even if that would help you can't do it if the engine is dead.

Answer 7

"Jetliners" require thrust to maintain speed of air over and under their wings. If a Jet were to loose all of its thrust at once, it would pretty much drop like a rock out of the sky. By angling the nose down, the pilot could gain some lift by airspeed on the wings. But I wouldn't call it "gliding".

And to the funny guy who replied that reverse jets are needed to slow the plane.. paleeze. Gimme a break. I don't know of any pilot that would "reverse" his engines in midair that didn't have a suicide wish. You must be refering to what you hear when the plane has already landed and the pilot slows the plane on the ground with brakes and braking the turbines.

Answer 8

Bostonian got it about as right as it gets.
Most transport category jets have a glide ratio of betwen 10 and 20:1 with the engines off. Several have landed successfully after long glides. (Gimli, Azores--as mentioned above)

Another important factor is that every student pilot's first experience with landing a plane is with power off--the throttle is brought back to idle even before the airplane is aligned with the runway and the student is taught to maneuver it around to alignment and the right altitude so that it glides to touchdown somewhere near the begining of the runway.

However, to the best of my knowledge, (as a former flight crew instructor for Boeing) none of the operations manuals for transport jets describe the correct airspeeds or give any other procedures for gliding one of their airplanes. Each pilot who has done this has succeeded by reaching deep into his well of experience to find the right key to the problem and effect a happy ending.

I salute every one of them.

Answer 9

In August, 2001 a Air Transat Airbus A-330 made a 18 minute glide to the to a US Military base in the Azores Island. It ran out of fuel somewhere over the Atlantic on it's way to Portugal from Canada. All of the passengers survived.
I didn't think that something that heavy could fly with out any power, but it can.

Answer 10

An aircraft can be deadstick landed, however, this can be quite challenging, especially if vertical energy isn't properly managed to the field of landing.

Believe it or not, there is a Captain for AeroMexico who has deadstick landed a Boeing 737 TWICE in his career. One time he lost both of his engines due to hail. He landed in either Mississippi or Alabama, I forget which. He landed alongside a highway. This was his second deadstick landing. His first deadstick landing took place in Mexico. He successfully landed on a runway. I do not know why his engines failed on that occasion.

He didn't do any damage at all to the aircraft in the Mexico incident. He did a very minimal amount of landing gear damage on the one in the southeastern U.S.