Edwards AFB B-1B Lancer – Crash Landing On Dry Lakebed

When up in the air, getting ready to come down and land, one of the last things that anyone would want to hear is that the front landing gear isn’t wanting to play along. After all, it’s one of the most essential parts of a safe landing. Without this landing gear, the front end of the aircraft will drag along on the ground. Who knows if a pilot would be able to safely recover from such an incident? It could easily be one that would throw an aircraft into a hectic and quite dangerous situation.

Unfortunately for the crew on board of this B-18 Lancer from the Dyess Air Force Base in Texas that would be the exact situation that they would be looking at. It certainly would prove to be quite a memorable one. It’s one of those situations that makes the heart drop into the stomach. We can’t help but get an incredibly anxious feeling, even from this side of the screen. It’s truly one of those “do or die” moments that would leave this pilot to pull out their best tactics to try and come up with a solution.

When faced with the tough situation to land the aircraft using nothing more than the rear wheels, this group of professionals wouldn’t let it phase them. Check out the award-winning landing as the crew diverts to another air Air Force Base with a dry lakebed and touches this thing down nice and softly, somehow avoiding complete catastrophe. It’s kind of hard to really put yourself on the scen and imagine what it was like. Having never been in such a spot, we would imagine that it’s a cocktail of incredible focus and nerves of steel. One false move here and everything is going to fly off of the rocker.