Because of the physiology of this airplane, there is nothing essentially dangerous about this gear door flapping in the breeze, other than the fact that it is a distraction and creates a need for an immediate return.
You put something like that directly into the wind at such an angle and it's going to fail. In the process of failing, instead of just coming off the airplane, it pulled the tail up and pulled the nose down.
We scare ourselves to death sometimes calling everything an emergency. We label the terminal a 'terminal'; we call landing a 'final approach.' But what we have really is a system that's safe because we refuse to let one iota get by without getting upset.
The bottom line is that a nose gear problem is not that big of a deal.
The FAA and others are going to have to take a hard look at this. I'm worried. Three times is too many.
There was no hurry to get the plane on the ground.
They look terrible and very frightening if you're in the airplane, but in fact it's a very small problem.
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