This is kind of patronizing to the pilots. There’s nothing particularly difficult about what they did, which has been practiced many times. They ran their checklists, and then landed the plane, and they did it well, just like any other qualified pilot should have. People need to stop conflating basic competence with heroics.

Age is always a factor in mechanical failure, but I’m sure this failure will be inspected in detail to try and avoid it again in the future

I would imagine simulator practice is a good amount different from executing the real thing when your adrenaline is kicking in and they have a full plane. They are professionals that executed a complex task gracefully to minimize the terror that their passengers experienced (they balanced on the back wheels for a long time to bleed off speed and the landing seemed more graceful than many with all landing gear that I've had). Why not give them some props instead of taking them for granted? Maybe the pilots weren't too worried, but I'm sure the passengers must have been pretty terrified.

Just to nitpick, this landing technique is something every pilot has to demonstrate to an FAA designated examiner to get their first pilot certificate (or, the private pilot license). So it's kind of like saying "Wow, you did the thing every pilot has to do!". I get what you're saying though - there's an emotional difference between doing this when everything is fine and when you have a real emergency.

I suspected it wasn’t required for every pilot since most initially licensed pilots will train on airplanes that don’t have retractable landing gears in the first place.

But I guess the technique isn’t much different than if your nose tire blew, which might be included in all training?

Looks like flying with a retractable landing gear is a separate “complex aircraft endorsement” that “has no corresponding check ride or minimum number of flight or ground hours that must be completed.“

https://www.flyingmag.com/guides/how-to-earn-a-complex-aircr...

The technique is the soft-field landing technique, required for every pilot[1]. It's for landing on soft surfaces such as a grass strip. You must land with the mains first and keep the nose wheel held off of the ground for as long as possible, gently setting it down. You don't need a complex aircraft for this.

This is the same technique the delta pilot used, and by other pilots that had an abnormal nose-wheel deployment.

[1]The airmen certification standards: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/training_testing/tes...

Gotcha, thanks!

There’s a difference between practicing for a situation and being able to perform under the pressure and stress of when it actually occurs and the consequences of failure are dire

They seemed to have timed placing the nose down better than I anticipated. It speaks to their experience how gently they were able to handle the situation.

An expert successfully doing the thing they trained for can still be praiseworthy.

The airframe was 23 years old, but odds are pretty much everything else on the plane had been replaced, probably multiple times, in that service life.