NASA cover-up of STS forced landings?

[Kyle]

Where did you get that from? Endeavour landed just fine, with a nominal drag-chute deploy by the PLT shortly after MLG touchdown.

Please state your source.

NasaSpaceFlight.com

Compare STS-124's landing and STS-123's, Discovery had wheel stop much before STS-123 did.

 

[Urwumpe]

Compare STS-124's landing and STS-123's, Discovery had wheel stop much before STS-123 did.

That does not tell you anything about the landing speed. It only tells you the distance of slow down. It does not tell you, how fast it decelerated, and how fast it initially was.

 

[Belisarius]

You could hardly call that pilot error.

I don't think I did. It was certainly an error in the chain of communication.

 

[Urwumpe]

I don't think I did. It was certainly an error in the chain of communication.

Well, that he did not watch the bank command needle was his error, but still, not the beginning of the problems.

 

[Belisarius]

Deger attributes this mess to his own fault in improperly training the crew:

"It is hard to believe we were doing such a bad job of teaching the manual phase of flying from Mach 1 to rolling out on final, but we were. The pilot usually takes control at Mach 1 on entry and hand flies the shuttle the rest of the way. This is about 80,000 feet altitude. We had in the training flow a single class in the simulator to teach this phase. A big problem was the flight director needles were turned off during this class and the student did a 100% manual flying task. This is not the way the shuttle is flown. The flight director needles are on and used extensively, but the pilots had zero training on how to use the needles. Even worse, this phase was not trained as the pilots came out of the pilot pool and were trained to fly an assigned flight. It was common when I took over for the pilots to not have taken this class in years."

A little scary, don't you think? Note that he is referring to the late 80s-early 90s, and one would hope the training regime has been tightened.

 

[Urwumpe]

A little scary, don't you think? Note that he is referring to the late 80s-early 90s, and one would hope the training regime has been tightened.

Yes, really scary. usually, you should train landings often enough to tell the difference between correct and anomaly.

 

[Moonwalker]

Heavyweight orbiters(more than 101 250 kg) is aiming for a touchdown velocity of 205 kts while lightweight orbiters (less than 92250 kg) aims for a touchdown velocity of 195 kts.

Theoretically yes. But practical, for example, as a lightweight orbiter (90,200 kg) on STS-98, Atlantis touched down at about 210/208 knots. At least the HUD showed that.

Touchdown speed is based on vehicle mass at touchdown.

Not only. It's also atmospheric conditions which have a big influences on landings and always make it a little bit different. Not a lot on Shuttle landings but it's slight different. No matter how often you practise it. At the end you have to touch down smooth, if it's a few knots above or below the theoretical defined speed at the moment of touchdown. Slight gusts easily make a practical touchdown different to a theoretical touchdown.

On heavy passenger airplanes manual landings differ even more than on the Shuttle, caused by more liberal weather limitations.