Once you’re grinding along the runway, is there anything the pilot can do?

‘Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended. The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction.’

Might be some complications with the nose gear and the payload bay (the main gear is on the wings, and untouched) but nothing terribly complicated. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was designed with some assumption of belly landings; it's a warplane after all.

Repairs surely isn't automatic, and who knows how tight that's program's budget is, but planes are repaired from such landings all the time, and if they attach any value to the vehicle it can be repaired, and not at great cost.

Best example I could find: https://youtu.be/KEz-r3dpQdo

Plowing the plane into a soft, uneven surface is far less predictable. You never know if you’re going to hit a stump or large rock hidden by grass.

It doesn’t make sense trying to save the air frame if you’re going to risk destroying it and killing the pilot in the process.

Landing outside the bounds of an airfield brings a bunch of other unnecessary risks as well, like hitting trees, people, cars, buildings, etc. And as a sibling comment noted, airports have a TON of protocols for emergency landings in place, such as clearing existing traffic from the runways and sky, and having ambulances and fire trucks standing by so they can be at the aircraft literally seconds after it skids to a stop. Golf courses typically do not.

The most core reason is that airports are designed for airplanes to land on them. Everything else follows from that. But, concretely:

1. Most airports you'd be landing on have dedicated emergency firefighters already on site who are extensively trained for exactly this sort of an event, so they'll be on top of your plane within minutes of touchdown.

2. The runway is appropriately large, with enough clearance in all three dimensions to accommodate malfunctioning aircraft.

3. In an emergency, you want to normalize the situation as much as possible, so that the only non-normal factor is the one you're dealing with — here it's the lack of gear. It's much easier to do a normal landing and deal with one issue than to do a completely abnormal landing.

4. Concerns like fuel economy or material damage are nice-to-have luxuries that we can afford during normal operations. The second anything non-normal happens, the one and only concern is saving lives. I assure you the pilot of this plane was exclusively focused on getting his passengers safely on the ground.

Edward's AFB is located at the edge of a dry lake bed exactly because it acts as a huge extended runway in case an aircraft under testing has problems landing and coming to a stop.

There was an entire supply chain of every single part ready to go, with technical manuals for every maintenance task you can imagine. If we couldn't fix something, it would go to the jet lab or machinists or whatever.

The system in place is mind bogglingly good.

/edited for a typo.

Because it was designed to operate in the same atmosphere as we had in the 1950's, it's highly customized with unique instruments and communication gear specialized for NASA and its systems, and they have a big shop filled with tools and spare parts accumulated over half a century to adapt to whatever conceivable thing comes up. They could drop a few hundred million and replace their WB-57s, but there isn't a real need.

> Are they machining their own engine parts?

The WB-57 engines are basically downrated, high-altitude versions of the Pratt & Whitney JT3D/TF33, not the original Avons. They are still in service today in military applications, so servicing them isn't some extraordinary concept. Plus, they don't see many flight hours, as these aircraft (there are 3) spend most of their time in a shop getting reworked for future missions, so engine overhauls aren't that frequent.

> I would imagine it's incredibly expensive to maintain.

All such aircraft are incredibly expensive. However, the Canberra is as old fashioned rivet and sheet metal design, and modifying it is relatively straightforward compared to most of what is manufactured today. It was designed as a bomber and has a large fuel and payload capacity, and a handy bomb-bay with large doors, filled with racks of mission specific gear.

I suspect this one can be repaired and returned to service. That's not uncommon for controlled belly landings. It did not appear to incur excessive damage in that landing, and there are mothballed Canberra in various boneyards around the world to provide replacement parts.

Plus, it's very likely that this plane is not an ancient as you think. New airframes are more efficient aerodynamically, weigh less, and offer more capabilities but depending on the role, those may not be huge advantages. Nearly everything ELSE on a typical airplane can be upgraded to modern standards. I haven't checked Wikipedia, but I highly doubt NASA's WB-57s are still running the original 1953 engines and avionics, for example.

Everything that flies is expensive to maintain but the costs to maintain most older aircraft tends to be much lower than new ones, sometimes even if certain unavailable parts need to be rebuilt or fabricated. Part of the difference is newer designs tend to use advanced composites and manufacturing techniques which can yield increased performance and efficiency but are expensive and often require specialized techniques to service/replace.

The second factor is that funding, designing, validating and manufacturing new military aircraft platforms has grown astronomically expensive for a huge number of reasons.

And if needed, to actually swap defective landing gear parts to whatever extent possible. Maybe difficult or impossible with current aircraft designs, but maybe future ones could be designed with this backup option. Maybe a secondary landing gear insertion point or something.

I assume this is made possible by explicit system (aircraft + airport) design decisions agreed upon 50+ years ago.

Just make a huge baseball glove to catch the plane as it's approaching.

Planes are so expensive that it's worth putting a lot of money into saving them. A replacement airframe comparable to the B-57 would probably cost $10 million, then you'd probably spend that much again to customize it for NASA mission. Even if they need to spend a couple million dollars fixing the WB-57 it beats the alternative.

Edit: It occurs to me that rather than use a different plane they'd probably reactivate another B-57 from the boneyard - but B-57's have been retired for > 50 years to restoring one would still be a significant project.

Scary, but as they say any landing you walk away from...