MOSCOW. June 10 (Interfax-AVN) - An emergency situation was registered on Thursday during the flight of a Tupolev Tu-142 aircraft of the Russian Naval Aviation.
"After the plane took off from the Ostrov airfield in the Pskov region, the right landing gear failed to retract," a military source in Moscow told Interfax-Military News Agency.
According to him, all attempts of the crew to retract the landing gear failed, and a decision was made to burn all fuel and try to land the plane.
"While the aircraft was circling in the sky for 2.5 hours, the command got in touch with experts, designers and pilots. They made a joint decision to land the aircraft with most load on the portside," the source said.
"In summary, only the professionalism of the crew headed by Lieutenant Colonel Molchanov helped to prevent the crash: the right landing gear was released in full after the pilot abruptly hit the left landing gear on the runway, and subsequently finished the landing," he stressed.
According to the source, the main danger was that the design of the aircraft does not envisage that the whole fuel load may be exhausted entirely. Therefore, about four tonnes of kerosene were in tanks when the plane was landing. Moreover, the Tu-142 is a turbo-prop aircraft, and propeller blades might have been torn in case of crash landing and caused explosion or fire in the aircraft.
There were nine crewmembers aboard the aircraft during the incident.