Boeing has released details about the design of the landing gear on the 737 Max 10, the longest version of the Max aircraft family.
The company has long been studying different gear options, but has settled on a levered design that enables the gear to extend 241mm (9.5in) upon rotation during take-off, says 737 Max chief project engineer Gary Hamatani in a video released by Boeing.
Boeing
"We've put in this new lever. This lever extends down that 9.5in to provide us that rotation," he says (above).
The design is similar to the gear on the 777-300, Boeing says.
United Technologies Aerospace Systems manufactures the landing gear.
Boeing launched the CFM International Leap-1B-powered 737 Max 10 at the Paris air show in 2017.
The aircraft will carry 188 passengers and have a range of 3,300nm, Boeing says.
But the Max 10 has a length of 43.8m, about 1.6m longer than the next largest Max variant, the Max 9. That meant Boeing needed to modify the gear while maintaining type commonality.
Boeing
"A longer fuselage, typically necessitates a longer landing gear. But a longer landing gear would then require changes to items such as the main gear wheel well," says Hamatani. "We wanted to preserve commonality in the Max family. We needed to get the landing gear back into the same unchanged wheel well as the Max 8 and 9."
In addition to the lever, the Max 10's main gear has a steel "innovating shrinking mechanism", dubbed a "shrink link" (above), that pulls the inner cylinder as the gear retracts, enabling it to fit in the same wheel well, he says.
"From a pilot's perspective, there is absolutely nothing different from the Max 10 landing gear and the existing Max family," Hamatani adds.
Source: Cirium Dashboard
