Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ The Russian 'Fighterbomber' Telegram channel posts an interesting recollection on a (fortunately now defunct) item of Soviet military technology - the Airfield Braking Unit or ATU, which did not exactly work as the designers had planned. ⬇️

2/ Fighterbomber writes: "One of the most difficult elements of flight science and flight in general is landing an aircraft.

3/ "Sometimes due to the pilot's mistakes in landing or some failures of aircraft braking devices of any length, the runway is not enough to stop the aircraft within its limits and the aircraft rolls away to the dump. Together with the crew, or without it.

4/ "Since the landing speeds of modern aircraft are already over three hundred kilometres per hour, you can go very far away, which will almost inevitably result in damage to the expensive aircraft, or even turn into a disaster.

5/ "The engineering minds decided that this would not do, oats are expensive nowadays, and remembering that an aeroplane is a bird, and birds are caught with nets, they made nets for catching aeroplanes rolling off the runway.

6/ "And they called them ATUs. It looks like a volleyball net, but with vertical lines, which according to the designers' idea the aircraft will catch with its wings and stop painlessly.

7/ "In practice, everything turned out to be not so rosy. After leaving the runway, the planes categorically refused to fly in a straight line into the center of the ATU so that it would work as intended.

8/ "They flew into it at random, knocking down the booms, which did not carry out their duty, wrecking the planes up to their ass.

9/ "The lines grabbed the planes by the wings and not at all kindly turned them over on the roof, leaving the crews bewildered and without the ability to independently leave the stricken plane, which, as a rule, caught fire from such impolite treatment.

10/ "Well, it is difficult to imagine the mood of the pilot who flies at full speed into the ATU, holding on to the handles and thinking to pull, or what?

11/ "But then the problems with getting into the centre of the ATU resolved themselves, because the installations ran out of resources (shelf life), the country ran out of money and little by little all the ATUs were taken out of service. Written off.

12/ "Now the only thing that slows down the planes that roll off are the barbed wire fences around the airfields, buildings, trees, bushes, and now even corn.

13/ "I would really take this into account for people who buy housing and summer cottages in the approach strip to the runway. Because your illegal summer cottage can easily act as an ATU, and you will be its operator." /end

Source:
t.me/fighter_bomber…