Last night was a beautiful evening, that is unless you happened to be channel surfing as we were, and come across Anderson Cooper talking between shots of a Southwest Airlines plane on fire and evacuating passengers via emergency slide.

Of course it wouldn't have been a pleasant end to the day for the passengers aboard Flight 519 from New Orleans to Houston either, as sitting aboard a flaming plane wasn't in the plans.

Upon landing at Houston-Hobby airport, the Southwest jet's tire caught fire and burned steadily through until emergency personnel arrived to the crippled plane on the runway. At that point, the rear left emergency slide deployed to get all 47 passengers and 5 crew out safely. ]]> JetSetCD 2009-05-13T08:38:40-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/2/14/141421/155

Passengers and crew on a British Airways flight arriving in London Friday night got a serious scare as the plane's nose wheel collapsed during landing, sending the Avro 146 RJ100 skidding down the runway until it came to a stop. None of the 67 passengers and four crew members were killed, but one suffered minor injuries during the evacuation, which involved those deployable exit slides that would probably be a lot of fun outside of emergency situations. The flight originated in Amsterdam and was touching down at London City Airport, a single-runway airport for STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) airliners that primarily serves the city's financial district, when the nose gear buckled with a resounding boom. ]]> Victor Ozols 2009-02-14T14:14:21-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2007/8/17/82442/1019

As a pilot, if you landing gear doesn't come down you can hit the panic button with a sledge hammer, or you can execute a belly landing. The pilot in the above clip chose the latter and executed an absolutely immaculate emergency belly landing at Fulton County Airport just west of Atlanta.

Here is the most picture-perfect emergency landng I think I've ever seen. Beech KingAir undercarriage doesn't come down, pilot lands it like he's done it a million times before.

Here is hoping no one is ever in the above situation, but if you do, try to handle it like this pilot did.]]> markj 2007-08-17T09:25:09-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/