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This came from the balloon catching aircraft idea...
There is an episode of Thunderbirds where a giant plane is caught on the runway by a set of moving wheels.
The landing gear of a commercial airplane is as big as a house. The aircraft carries this everywhere they go, but they only use them for
take-off and landing.
A tube is a strong, stiff structure. It gets weaker if you put holes in it. Get rid of the landing gear, and the airframe will be stronger because it no longer has the hole to let the wheels out, and considerable weight saving. The catcher can use magnetic or vacuum clamps to spread the load over the body and wings so you avoid the point stresses when landing.
What happens if you have to put down an aircraft in an emergency? On land or water, the best option is usually to leave the wheels folded, and land the aircraft on its belly. The aircraft body is lower, and the wheels won't dig in and get the plane to somersault.
The aircraft is loaded at a dock at the airport. Maybe it stands on a light set of wheels so the aircraft can be moved. A heavy set of wheels takes the aircraft to the runway and locks into the runway launcher. This flings the aircraft down the runway and put its nose in the air at the right point. The launch may be powered by the energy taken out of the last aircraft that landed. The aircraft uses its engines to take off and land too, but maybe some energy can be recycled. Aircraft routinely land under computer control when it is foggy, so coordinating this should not be too hard.
Runway ball transfer conveyer
https://www.condriv...table-ball-casters/
[whatrock, Oct 01 2026]
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// Maybe explosive bolts attaching the underwing engines could allow them to be jettisoned just before impact on the water surface? |
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This comment relates to aircraft with no landing gear but appears in the airplane catcher. The objection was that the engines may hit the ground in an emergency landing and cause the plane to sumersault. |
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Ditching the landing gear means a serious re-design. The engine pod is typically hung on a pylon beneath the wing. This pylon has to support the engine's weight and the acceleration, and to transfer the forward thrust to the wing. It could be made relatively weak to anything pushing the engine back, so the engines would snap off in an emergency landing. That would be a good feature even if you had landing gear, and it would weigh nothing to do. |
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The title alone made me think of an episode of Thunderbirds, where a giant plane is caught on the runway by a set of moving wheels. |
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Taking off needs more power than cruising in normal flight. The plane may need larger engines to take off, with a lot of the capacity sitting idle for most of the time. If you're going to have dedicated launching equipment anyway, you might as well have a full-on plane projector, and reduce the weight of the engines also. |
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Maybe for emergencies there could be an emergency lube deployment system. |
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These measures would make flying much more exciting. |
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An easy sell in our modern times - good for both thrill seekers and the environmentally conscious. |
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No. Because only a few airports would be setup for it, and the vast majority of small regional airports will never get the equipment because it isn't needed by the planes that operate out of them most of the time. In least 150 instances commercial aircraft HAVE had to perform emergency landings at other, smaller, regional airports on actual runways with their gear down. Sometimes they have to land at TINY little remote airports intended for bush planes, and they need their gear for that. Your idea would all but guarantee that nearly EVERY emergency landing is done without landing gear, resulting in loss of the aircraft every time. |
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// No. Because only a few airports would be setup for it, |
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Planes with no wheels won't come in overnight. It makes most sense for flights with large aircraft and the longest journeys. You aircraft from Manchester to London Heathrow would have wheels, but maybe the next leg onto Sydney might not. |
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Airport ramps and runways could be surfaced with ball transfer conveyers, those captive-marble tables for moving stock items in warehouses (link). Braking would be done entirely with the engine reverse thrust feature. |
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I read the first paragraph in the comments and immediately upvoted without reading the idea or the rest of the comments, because explosive bolts. |
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I was thinking a plane with electro-magnets. Three sections. Each has a parachute. If the plane suddenly has no power, the plane is broken into 3 pieces and each section has a parachute that deploys. |
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If three is better than one, then logically nine is better than three, and 27 is proportionally better than 9. The ultimate and logically obvious solution is that the plane is made of detcord panels, and in an emergency it vapourises, leaving each passenger dangling from their own personal parachute. Presumably each item of passenger luggage should also have its own mini parachute as well. |
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It is hard to make an ejector seat in a helicopter. One practical solution is to drop the seating capsule. No parachute. This has been tried. The capsule has space on the inside, so it drops more slowly than a single person, and should stay right side up if the weight of the passengers and their seats is towards the bottom. The impact will be a shock but this can be absorbed by soft seats, and you have time to adjust your head support. |
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Where this makes most sense isn't passenger jets. If anything, it's long-endurance military drones. They have the largest penalty and being smaller, their material strength to mass ratio is favorable. Plus, they're somewhat expendable in comparison. |
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Several small & medium fixed-wing UAVs are hand- or catapult-launched & 'belly land'; no wheels or skids or whatever. |
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