A United Airlines Shuttle Air Express plane made an emergency landing at Newark Airport without its front nose landing gear. The airport was temporarily closed as crews responded to the landing—the passengers and crew left the plane via emergency chutes.
The plane, an Embraer 170, was the Shuttle America 3:47 p.m. flight from Atlanta to Newark. According to WABC 7, "The pilot declared an emergency because of a problem with the landing gear. The pilot said an unsafe landing gear indicator turned on in the cockpit. He did a flyby of the air traffic control tower so FAA controllers could see what was wrong with the landing gear. They reported that the nose gear was not extended. The tail gear was fine."
When air traffic control gave the okay for the pilot to land, the Port Authority put foam on the runway and the plane landed just before 6:30 p.m., on its belly. Here's video of the plane landed at the airport:
There were 69 passengers and four crew members on the flight; no one was injured. NYC Aviation reports, "Another Shuttle America Embraer E-170 had a similar issue and landed without its nose gear at Washington Dulles Airport in 2006. In that incident, the crew of United Flight 7512, operated by N651RW, got an nose gear error light when they attempted retracting the gear upon takeoff from Houston. Deciding it was not an actual malfunction, the pilots decided to continue to Dulles as planned, but were unable to deploy the nose gear on approach. The plane landed without its nose gear at Dulles, injuring one of the 61 people onboard. The NTSB blamed the accident on "improper servicing of the nose landing gear strut and the operator’s inadequate maintenance procedure,” and “the inadequate checklist provided to the flight crew by the operator.'"
United issued a statement, "On approach, the flight crew was not able to confirm that the nose gear had deployed correctly. After receiving confirmation from Newark Air Traffic Control that the nose gear was not down, the crew declared an emergency, prepared the cabin and safely landed. All customers and crew were safely bussed to the terminal."
