On Wednesday morning, a Delta Air Lines Boeing 717 suffered a nose gear malfunction upon landing at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Despite the nose gear not deploying, the plane landed safely.

The Incident

Delta Air Lines flight 1092 is a regularly-scheduled flight between Delta's largest hub in Atlanta, GA (ATL) and Charlotte, NC (CLT). The flight has a scheduled departure time of 7:27 a.m. and an arrival time of 8:43 a.m., both in Eastern Standard Time (EST).

[ATL,CLT]

On Wednesday, June 28th, DL1092 departed Atlanta without issue, operated by a Boeing 717-200 registered N955AT pictured below.

Atlanta to Charlotte is a relatively quick flight, clocking in at just under an hour of total flight time. The flight was overall uneventful until the approach into Charlotte, when the crew began lowering the landing gear. It was here when a "nose gear unsafe" indication surfaced, warning that the aircraft's nose gear was not deploying.

Playback data from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 shows that around 12:20 UTC (8:20 a.m. EST), the aircraft executed a missed approach. At this time, the plane was on final approach onto CLT's Runway 36L, however, the pilots realized at this point that the nose gear was not down, thus prompting the go-around.

Upon notifying the CLT tower of the issue, the Boeing 717 was permitted to do a low pass so the tower could verify that the nose gear was, in fact, not down and locked.

The Boeing 717 did one low pass over Runway 36L, flying as low as 700 feet above the ground according to Flightradar24. The plane did one more loop before making an emergency landing on RWY 36L and coming to a stop on the runway just after 8:50 a.m. EST. Passengers reported the landing was rather smooth and video of the incident showed the cabin as mostly calm and collected.

There were 101 occupants onboard the aircraft consisting of 96 passengers, three flight attendants, and two pilots. Everyone evacuated the aircraft safely and no injuries were reported. The plane was later towed off the runway so that flights could resume as normal at CLT.

The Aircraft

A Boeing 717 registered as N955AT was the aircraft involved. This aircraft was built in 2000 and delivered brand new to the airline AirTran in November of that year.
 

In 2014, the jet was handed over to Delta after AirTran was taken over by Southwest Airlines. Southwest did not need AirTran's massive Boeing 717 fleet, hence why the aircraft all went to Delta.

After completing the Atlanta flight, N955AT was scheduled to operate the 9:38 am flight DL2490 from Charlotte to Detroit. Due to the incident, that flight was canceled, and the plane remains in Charlotte awaiting repair.

Aftermath

The stricken Boeing 717 landed on Runway 36L/18R, which was subsequently closed after the jet landed. Charlotte Douglas International Airport has three parallel runways that can operate simultaneously. When 36L/18R was closed, operations continued as normal on parallel runways 36C/18C and 36R/18L. 

It should be noted that between roughly 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. EST, certain arriving and departing flights did receive significant delays. However, no indication has been given that this was due to the Delta flight's emergency landing.

The Boeing 717 was removed from the runway by airport crews by Wednesday evening. At the time of this article being written, operations have resumed as normal on Runway 36L/18R.