Typically, if it is a retractable gear, the answer is that it has been landed gear up and the cost to repair it was not worth. I wonder what plane that was. Not a DA42, for sure. Maybe a very shagged Seminole with near-TBO engines? A simply equipped and poor condition twin is worth only what the engines are worth.
C172RG, Arrow, Piper Twin Comanche So in general pretty old planes with certainly near TBO engines. Let's see where the DA42 of today will be in 40 years from now...
I'm scared as hell about a gear up landing. What I personally do to minimise the risk:
Never fly with the gear warning on. Either put in more power in decent or drop the gear.
No annunciator lights allowed in flight. If something is broken fix it. So the red gear light will definitely stand out.
Drop the gear at the same moment each time and fly a known power setting on a VFR/IFR approach. If the gear is not out the numbers will not match.
Always land with full flaps for multiple reasons but also to be sure to trigger the gear warning.
Do a final check! All other in flight checks are good but this one is the most important one.
Do a short final check. If I pull the power all the way back over the fence. The green light from the gear is the "traffic light" for the runway. No green, no landing.
Besides that the manufacturers could do a lot to improve the warnings. I think the PC12 has got a system which is linked to the GPS database. Not perfect if you land on a farm strip but a lot better than the usual systems. Besides that all those beeping sounds are just too much. We have alt preselect, radio altimeter, stall warning and gear warning all doing beep sounds. A voice saying "gear gear" would be a lot harder to ignore.
In the Mooney, the gear and stall horn is not heard through the headset, presenting something of a hazard. Some people put this thing in to change that, I am looking into it but have not been able to find out if it has an EASA STC or is otherwise (grandfather rights) allowed to be installed.
I've had one incident, where the "stall warning" vs " landing gear horn" almost caught me. I was on a rather steep approach into Bressaucourt. The gear was selected down and "looked" as if it was properly locked down too (manual Johnson Bar gear) and even withstood the "shake your johnson" test on final. During Flare I faintly heard the beep of what I thought the stall warning. On Touch Down I noticed that the gear light had turned red (my perception was it had been green after gear down, but that may have been "expecting to see" rather than the truth). I immediately gripped the Gear lever and kept it in place and, upon reaching a stop, forced the lock upwards once again until it clicked in place and the light went green (again?).
Had I received a voice warning "Landing Gear" on flare, a go around would have been automatic I think.
I know of one M20C which had a gear collapse due to an improperly locked Johnson bar after landing and during taxi. It was written off despite of moderate repair costs which nevertheless exceeded the airframe value.
In the Mooney, the gear and stall horn is not heard through the headset, presenting something of a hazard. Some people put This thing in to change that, I am looking into it but have not been able to find out if it has an EASA STC or is otherwise (grandfather rights) allowed to be installed.
That certainly looks like it is worth the $595 (plus shipping, taxes and installation!)....they have the Mooney on the AML so I might look into it....
Hello!
Is a gear-up landing inevitable?
Certainly not. The vast majority of retractable gear pilots never has one. The key to never having this kind of evitable accident is to fly in a well organised manner ("SOP is abc" they teach us every year in our CRM refresher courses - meaning that the basis for safe flight operations are standardised procedures - and by the way JasonC - I have not forgotten about the single pilot SOPs we talked about a couple of months ago - sooner or later I will have them together...).
The guy in the video was 95 percent saturated by his (difficult) approach into the "altiport". Having to look for other traffic cost him another 20 percent of his brain capacity which he did not have at that time. You can see that because all he does is looking straight ahead, classic textbook tunnel vision. Therefore his brain filtered out everything else including the stall warning horn (it has absolutely nothing to do with ANR headsets that they didn't hear it - their brains simply didn't let it get through - happens in every simulator mission when the instructor throws enough problems at you!) and the advice of the other pilot, who after landing said something like "didn't I tell you not to rush things?" - totally idiotic at that point and if he really is an instructor as someone mentioned earlier on this thread he should be retrained or give his license back!.
Training to fly in an organised way would have prevented this incident almost certainly. Flying a visual approach always the same way trains you to perform the basic tasks almost automatically without wasting brain capacity on them: First stage of flaps on downwind, gear down and starting descent when turning base, props forward and flaps to land when established on final. At some "gate" altitude, usually 500ft above threshold elevation, check your stability criteria (on centerline, on glideslope (or similar), fully configured, on speed) and then read your final checklist. Doesn't matter if you read it from a screen, paper or perform it from memory - the important thing is that you must feel uneasy if you haven't done it. Flying like this leaves you with almost 100 percent brain capacity for the important and difficult tasks while still flying with every possible safety net in place.
I know, that's more easy to say (or write) then to do, but it is the basis of professional training and professional flying.
I'm not saying it'll never happen to me, but:
I was lucky enough to have an instructor who drilled the GUMPS into me from lesson one. His - correct - take was that while I was of course flying a fixed gear a/c at the time, one day I would progress to RGs. Which I have. I do the GUMPS religiously on entry, downwind, and final. Every time, no matter if I fly a retract or not.
Has recently saved my bacon, as I got into the classic near-overload situation: hadn't flown in a couple of months, doing my BFR, during an approach to KVNY which I hadn't flown in years and then the controller changes rwy at the last second (for the unfamiliar: KVNY has two parallel rwys, 16 L&R, which have two different tower frequencies). So, dial in new frequency, look for traffic (it's always rush hour there!), reconfigure for the displaced threshold of 16L. Instructor said nothing at this stage, he wanted to see what I did next. Did the GUMPS, a bit late, but gear went down and all was well.
Btw, the gear warning horn is one of the first things you 'learn' to more or less ignore on the Cessna RGs. Not saying that's a good thing, but you do.
This picks up from here
It may be worth discussing what different interlock systems are present in different types.
Let me start with the TB20: you get a warning if you do either of
and the gear is not down.
What is interesting is how these two interlocks can be defeated. The famous gear-up at Megeve (famous only because the back seat occupant got a video and posted it on Yoube) is here
One obvious way to defeat it is to make a habit of not using full flap. That is fairly popular in the USA where a pilot can spend his whole life on long tarmac runways. Then, if you are landing into a strong headwind, the second protection is gone because the throttle will never go down low enough.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but there’s no way around simple truths…
1) fly a fixed gear plane
2) have the gear lever coupled mechanically to the flaps lever, or even make them one and the same like on the Europa Monowheel. Everyone can (and, as I read, will one day, sooner or later) forget to lower the gear but few pilots will forget to extend flaps. Or would there be any planes with retractable gear but no flaps?
3) Have a checklist
Run the GUMPS (or similar) check every time. And I mean EVERY time you land, even in a fixed-gear airplane.
I don’t believe much in the interlinked warnings on light airplanes, as they are rather crude. And yes, Peter, unless going into a short field, I never (other than occasionally for training purposes) land with full flaps – why would I?
