DHL Airbus A300 landed to Baghdad with severe missile damage

[Have]

Wow, this is truly pretty amazing story of great piloting skills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUstvXSytRc&feature=related

AVweb's Glenn Pew http://www.glennpew.com reports on the Nov. 22, 2003 incident -- a A DHL crew flying out of Baghdad airport was forced to land their Airbus A300 without any controllable flight surfaces after being hit with a surface to air missile.

[Noir]

Truly amazing skills. I've read somewhere that airliners in the middle east were thinking about installing chaft and other countermeasures on their planes, after seeing that, I guess its not overkill.

[SectorNine50]

Man, that is some serious piloting...

Can you imagine trying to land one of those things at around 250 mph to keep the nose up?  They usually land at around 140!!!   That must've been a very intense few moments while sliding to a stop...  Plus when the gear came out, the drag would cause the plane to pitch down a bit, wouldn't it?

[Jayhawk]

Wow, that's pretty cool.  I guess what surprised me is that all hydraulics were lost, I've work with hydraulics on farm equipment before and aircraft hydraulic systems never crossed my mind honestly but it seems like those would operate independent of the others.  Whatever, the guys who designed that thing are WAY smarter than me, they know what they're doing.

[trotter]

Unreal, can you imagine the flight engineer having to weigh the value of heading adjustment versus fuel loss? That's just scary to think about. Glad they had a convenient runway lined up.