The landing gear must be strong enough to carry the weight of the aircraft while being completely retractable to ensure a smooth flight.
As the pandemic has passed, the demand for air travel has risen by leaps and bounds. The start of the holiday season and the lifting of restrictions has led travelers and tourists to a traveling frenzy. Airlines are suddenly experiencing a rise in demand for the need for more latest, next-Gen, fuel-efficient, and sustainable aircraft to meet the rising passenger demands. A direct consequence of this rise in aircraft production is a surge in demand for robust airline parts and components. One of these components is the aerospace landing gear system.
The origins of the aerospace landing gear market can be traced back to the early 20th century. In the early years, landing gears consisted of skids with wheels added to them. These systems did not have much in the way of security, however, as they would soon become the cause behind many wrecks, due to their breaking on impact from hard landings.
Importance of landing gear systems in aerospace applications
One of the most prominent technological feats in the aerospace industry is the landing of a commercial aircraft. For safe landing, the aircraft must descend from heights of over 35,000 feet to the ground and slow its speed from some 650 miles to 0 miles per hour, whilst placing the entire weight onto a system of wheels and struts.
Thus, the landing gear must be strong enough to carry the weight of the aircraft, while being completely retractable to ensure a smooth flight.
Aircraft landing gear systems are an integral part of an aircraft. Indeed, landing gears have been hailed by many as mechanical marvels. According to reports by Airbus, these systems account for over 7% of the total weight of the aircraft and represent nearly 20% of the overall maintenance costs, which positions them as significant components of an efficient airline.
Landing gears are components that are designed to hold high loads during aircraft landing without incidents of damage to the aircraft or disturbance to passengers. These systems are also designed to carry the entire weight of the airplane while grounded.
The Innovation of ‘SMART Lander’
Recently, ATR and Safran Landing Systems have developed a Smart Lander, an innovative landing gear diagnostics service that uses state-of-the-art knowledge in data analysis to optimize the manufacturer’s response times in the event of hard landings and enable aircraft to be quickly returned to service.
This innovative service, the first of its kind in the aviation industry, relies on machine learning technology. Based on hundreds of thousands of hard landing simulations, Smart Lander issues recommendations to operators on the maintenance actions to be taken according to the hardness of the landing and to the load level sustained by the landing gear. Aircraft can subsequently be permitted to continue their commercial operations or alternatively, be sent to a maintenance base. This process takes less than an hour, compared to over a week previously.
David Brigante, ATR Senior Vice-President of Customer Support and Services, said, “Our former process could take up to 10 to 20 working days. It required analyses from both the ATR Design Office and Safran Landing Systems to decide whether the aircraft was fit to return to service. With Smart Lander, we will be able to massively reduce our response times, therefore boosting aircraft availability, reducing costs for customers, and enhancing customer satisfaction, while maintaining the same level of analysis quality.”
Patrick Joyez, Technical Director at Safran Landing Systems, said, “We have been working hand in hand with ATR, capitalizing on our joint know-how regarding landing gear and the operations performed by ATR to develop this health-monitoring service, analyzing the condition of the landing gear based on Safran’s expertise in harnessing data. Smart Lander is a true breakthrough in terms of landing load analysis, which will offer real value to ATR operators.”
By considerably reducing the response times required for returning the aircraft to service after a hard landing, Smart Lander will offer undeniable advantages to both ATR and its customers in terms of man-hours, aircraft availability, and customer satisfaction.
Types of landing gears and their components
Aerospace landing gear systems, also known as the undercarriage, are a complex combination of various structural components. These include energy absorption equipment, brakes, tires, and wheels. They also include components like retracting mechanisms and steering devices, among others.
Different aircraft feature diverse aircraft landing gear types, depending on their requirements, like floats, wheels, skis, skids, or pontoons. Of these, the skid type of landing gear is used often in balloon gondolas, helicopters, and tail dragger aircraft. Skis-type landing gears demonstrate great potential in aircraft that frequently land or take off in snowy areas or frozen water bodies. In aircraft that operate on water surfaces, the pontoon-type landing gears are used.
