Hydraulic System

 Hydraulic System


        The hydraulic system is a very important system that can be found as small as in the brakes of a small airplane or as big a system as moving all flight control on an airplane. To make it easy to understand, the hydraulic system works with a special fluid being moved through a set of pipes or lines, to make things work. This fluid is said to be uncompressible or it resists to compress. The whole system is pressurized when working, meaning that the fluid is being moved, and that movement makes pistons move, making some other systems like landing gear, brakes, spoilers, and many others work.

        The system is pretty reliable, but if there is even a small leak of fluid in the system, everything will gradually stop working depending on the amount of fluid that is leaking. For example, in the Learjet 60, a hydraulic failure will make landings very difficult to manage. The landing gear won't be able to go down, the brakes won't work, spoilers are inoperative, and thrust reversers will not work either. All of these will mean that all the systems that were meant to stop and brake the aircraft after landing won't be available, meaning that you will need a very long runway. The aircraft's normal landing distance is around 5000 ft approximately, and with all these systems not working, the checklist call to "multiply landing distance by 3". In the event of a hydraulic failure on this aircraft, you will need to land on a runway that is more than 10,000 ft.

        Fortunately, there are many solutions to this. When dealing with a hydraulic failure, the brakes won't work, but there is an alternative, by using pressurized air to actuate the brakes, which is not as efficient but will help you brake. Spoilers and Thrust reversers will be inoperative, and you have no backup for this. Last but most importantly, the aircraft needs to land, and with no hydraulics, the landing gear can't go down. In this case, we have two alternate ways to lower the gear, both using a pressurized air bottle, in case one fails, making this very redundant.

        So as we have seen, the hydraulic system is very important, and a failure of this can be very stressful, even with all the redundancy that is behind it. 



- The hydraulic fluid is color red, so that is easy to identify, here we can see a leak in the hydraulic system

References

    Bombardier Aerospace. Crew and Checklist Quick Reference Handbook. https://caisatech.net/uploads/XXI_3_LEARJET_H51_LJ60_O_QRH_R1_ENE2010.pdf

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