An aviation emergency in the New South Wales Hunter Valley on Monday ended with the best possible outcome. The pilot declared an emergency when his light plane's landing gear failed. In the hours it took to burn off enough fuel to attempt a belly landing a team of air force air traffic controllers worked through scenarios and put emergency equipment in place.
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00:00 All eyes were on the sky here at Newcastle Airport on Monday.
00:06 Now, there was an emergency unfolding in the air above.
00:09 What had happened was, just after takeoff at 8.30, a light plane reported problems with
00:16 its landing gear.
00:17 Its wheels were stuck and there was an emergency declared.
00:20 Now, this plane was circling above for four hours, burning off fuel.
00:25 What people don't know is, down here on the ground, within the confines of the RAF base
00:30 here at Williamtown, there was a team of four air flight traffic controllers who were working
00:36 with the pilot, Peter Schott, in terms of planning for what would be an emergency landing.
00:42 Now, among the team is Flight Lieutenant Bree Woolett, and she's spoken exclusively to the
00:48 ABC.
00:49 Here's a bit of what she's had to say.
00:51 He advised us he didn't think he was going to be capable of landing the aircraft with
00:55 the landing gear down.
00:57 So from there, the term is a belly landing, so that's when the aircraft lands on the runway
01:03 without their wheels down.
01:04 Obviously, a very undesirable situation.
01:07 And in that moment, we escalated the emergency to what we call a full emergency.
01:11 Now, of course, with the hours that the plane was circling above, Flight Lieutenant Woolett
01:17 said that that bought them some time because he was burning off fuel and it allowed them
01:21 to prepare for the conditions and what might follow after this emergency landing.
01:27 So she elaborated on that time and how they planned for when there would be impact.
01:34 Burning down that fuel prior to landing was something that needed to happen, and that
01:38 bought us hours.
01:40 So yeah, that was something we had in our favour.
01:44 It gave the pilot a lot of time to troubleshoot, so he was talking a lot with his ops and his
01:49 engineering team, working through a lot of solutions.
01:51 But it also gave us a lot of time to activate the response.
01:56 Flight Lieutenant Woolett also took us through, while watching this landing, a replay of this
02:02 emergency landing, just what it felt.
02:04 And she described moments by moments as to what was going on.
02:10 I'm just reflecting on how we all felt in the tower, and I think just absolute apprehension
02:15 followed by huge, huge waves of relief.
02:19 Just the best possible situation we all could have hoped for.
02:22 Yeah, incredible.
02:24 Now of course, as she said and confirmed, it was a textbook landing that the pilot very
02:30 experienced and the ultimate decision was up to him in terms of when he made that emergency
02:36 landing.
02:37 They'd gone through run-throughs of it, but ultimately at 12.18 it was up to the pilot
02:42 to bring that plane down, and she said that he did so in a textbook manner.
02:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]