00:00 All eyes were on the sky here at Newcastle Airport on Monday.
00:06 Now, there was an emergency unfolding in the air above.
00:09 What had happened was, just after takeoff at 8.30, a light plane reported problems with
00:16 its landing gear.
00:17 Its wheels were stuck and there was an emergency declared.
00:20 Now, this plane was circling above for four hours, burning off fuel.
00:25 What people don't know is, down here on the ground, within the confines of the RAF base
00:30 here at Williamtown, there was a team of four air flight traffic controllers who were working
00:36 with the pilot, Peter Schott, in terms of planning for what would be an emergency landing.
00:42 Now, among the team is Flight Lieutenant Bree Woolett, and she's spoken exclusively to the
00:48 ABC.
00:49 Here's a bit of what she's had to say.
00:51 He advised us he didn't think he was going to be capable of landing the aircraft with
00:55 the landing gear down.
00:57 So from there, the term is a belly landing, so that's when the aircraft lands on the runway
01:03 without their wheels down.
01:04 Obviously, a very undesirable situation.
01:07 And in that moment, we escalated the emergency to what we call a full emergency.
01:11 Now, of course, with the hours that the plane was circling above, Flight Lieutenant Woolett
01:17 said that that bought them some time because he was burning off fuel and it allowed them
01:21 to prepare for the conditions and what might follow after this emergency landing.
01:27 So she elaborated on that time and how they planned for when there would be impact.
01:34 Burning down that fuel prior to landing was something that needed to happen, and that
01:38 bought us hours.
01:40 So yeah, that was something we had in our favour.
01:44 It gave the pilot a lot of time to troubleshoot, so he was talking a lot with his ops and his
01:49 engineering team, working through a lot of solutions.
01:51 But it also gave us a lot of time to activate the response.
01:56 Flight Lieutenant Woolett also took us through, while watching this landing, a replay of this
02:02 emergency landing, just what it felt.
02:04 And she described moments by moments as to what was going on.
02:10 I'm just reflecting on how we all felt in the tower, and I think just absolute apprehension
02:15 followed by huge, huge waves of relief.
02:19 Just the best possible situation we all could have hoped for.
02:22 Yeah, incredible.
02:24 Now of course, as she said and confirmed, it was a textbook landing that the pilot very
02:30 experienced and the ultimate decision was up to him in terms of when he made that emergency
02:36 landing.
02:37 They'd gone through run-throughs of it, but ultimately at 12.18 it was up to the pilot
02:42 to bring that plane down, and she said that he did so in a textbook manner.
02:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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