Quote Originally Posted by mklotz View Post
If I were the pilot I would hunt down the airplane designer who designed a nose wheel that could rotate to that position and do something to him that could be pled down to attempted manslaughter when my case comes to court.
When you think about it all nose wheels have to be able to rotate 90° in either direction for when the aircrafts steers into or away from the gates.
Due to the diameter of the tires many if not most large passenger planes have to rotate the wheels to the 90° position in order for them to have enough room under the belly of the plane to be stowed away.
It seems a stupid idea to me though since the nose wheels are locked in the forward position on take off why not shift some of the internal stuff one way or the other to allow them to remain in the forward locked position.
Looks to me like a simple enough solution, just make them to operate much like the parking brakes do on a semi. but instead to linier motion of the spring brake and air application chamber rotating an S cam shaft make it pure linier with a wide tapered key to fit in a tapered slot.
It would require pressure to release the lock which could only be applied when there was weight on the strut and could not be unlocked after take off.
But the gear setups that give me the willies are the main gear that go through a number of gyrations to fold for storage