Why Gear Up Landings Happen

[Music] people collect all kinds of stuff coins stamps whole cars antique beer bottles it's way too boring for me so I collect gear-up landing videos and let me tell you there's no shortage of them out there on YouTube there were an Oscar category for filming gear up these guys would win hands down this was filmed a couple of weeks ago by KO mo news in seattle and it's as good as it gets look at the end game here in a minute but first let's consider the technology this coverage is done by this kind of equipment gyro-stabilized cameras mounted on helicopters and it takes both flying skill and operator skill to get a shot this good now back to the live action with the airplane on short final while we're waiting for the touchdown consider what you're seeing here except for the missing nose gear it looks like a normal landing and that's the way it should look what you don't see is the pilot shutting down the engines on short final but not everyone does it that way this gear up happened at Daytona Beach a few months ago and you can see the pilot has caged both engines and feathered the props so in addition to no landing gear he's now got a 4,000 pound glider I'll come back to that in a minute but first let's talk about gear up landings in general hopping to these things happened well maybe not every day but they're not rare either if an airplane has retractable gear big airplane little airplane props and jets there's a way to land it with the wheels up I pulled some data from the NTSB website and over a period of five years beginning in 2010 I found about 80 gear up landings but I'm pretty sure not all Europe's are reported so there could be what twice as many maybe you won't find an insurance agent that hasn't had a gear up climb or two maybe a lot of them I research this subject a couple of times and the pattern is always the same a little over half are caused by pilots just forgetting to put the wheels down well you can get busy next are the mechanical issues where the gear just won't extend at all won't extend fully or one or more of the wheels won't come down that's about 30% and that's what happened in the kom oh footage the nose gear was just hung up blastaar the gear collapses which account for about 15% of gear up landings those often happen out of the blue sometimes because of bad landing put a lot of side load on the gear causing it to fail it's usually just one gear leg not all three a lot of these are also due to poor maintenance gear systems need a lot of TLC to work correctly in reliably and some of them just don't get it if there's a poster child for gear-up landing that would be the Cessna 210 nearly one in five gear up landings involved with 210 but probably two good reasons for this one is that there are a lot of to tens flying nearly 10,000 were built second to 210 has a complex gear system that works well but it requires careful maintenance almost half of the gear up landings in 210s involve mechanical issues here's an interesting comparison more than 17,000 bonanzas of various models have been built but they're underrepresented in gear up landings only 5% of gear ups involve bonanzas of any model I attribute that to a simpler gear system that's more tolerant of poor maintenance in most of these videos after landing the occupants usually unasked a thing like snakes on a plane they do that presumably because they're worried about fire fair enough but fire almost never happens in years of reviewing these incidents I found only a couple of posts light fires one actually destroyed the airplane gear up landings and large airplanes usually produce a lot of Sparks and while fire doesn't always happen then either there have been some spectacular examples like this FedEx md-11 that caught fire in Fort Lauderdale after a gear collapse in little airplanes fire is just a little less likely that doesn't mean you should hang around in the cabin but don't break a leg trying to get out either it's okay we'll look around for your glasses and even though there was no apparent fire in this gear up the airplane got a squirt of foam anyway I hope they dowsing interior - so the owner can at least get some fresh upholstery out of the deal sadly I have no video of inadvertent gear up landings because they're always a surprise no one is hanging around runways waiting for them to happen least of all me but inevitably when pilots were asked why they didn't put the wheels down they explained that something distracted them from their normal routine say looking for another airplane in the pattern or turbulence and in two cases an unexpected Tower assigned right base so if you fly retractable be on guard against distractions in my flying career I personally witness to gear up landings thankfully as an observer not a participant 1 was an unintentional gear up of what else a Cessna 210 later on the pilot told me he had been distracted by an airplane that cut him off in the pattern he said two things stood out about the experience one the rollout was really short then second it's a much shorter step to get out of the cockpit when the wheels are folded up in the fuselage he bashed his head on the wing getting out now some thoughts about the unavoidable gear-up landing if the wheels absolutely positively won't come down earlier I mentioned that shutting down the engine or both engines on a twin isn't the best idea here's why I think most pilots do this in an attempt to save the engines and maybe the props but the reality is that unless you're nervy enough to bump the props horizontal with the starter props are going to get trashed anyway actually it looks like the pilot in this gear up did exactly that but where the engine is running or not both continental and Lycoming recommend that the engines be torn down and inspected if the prop has been damaged your insurance company is going to pay for that including replacing any parts damaged by the landing and this gear collapse incident although the pilot may have got one prop out of the way it looks like the prop just gets bumped on touchdown wonder if the insurance company is going to forego the insane just to say 30 grand I'm going to guess no on that one shutting down the engines complicates things because you're adding difficulty to the already stressful task of landing with no wheels and you're doing that to what saving your insurance company some money makes no sense to me also is shown here the airplane will glide a lot better with the engines case and that could result in an overshoot in a crash instead of an uneventful slide down the runway it's just better to keep the engines running in case you need to go around or otherwise maneuver just land normally and pull the mixtures to idle at touchdown and when you're sure the runway is made have your insurance agents number on speed dial giving the choice of landing on pavement or grass some pilots pick the grass on the theory that it will do less damage to the airplane and reduce the chance of fire but as I mentioned fire is a rarity and turf can actually do more damage because the airplane can dig into soft ground tearing up the belly in the nose panels you can also hit hidden obstacles like drainage dishes and airport lighting I think it's just better to stay on the pavement and accept the slide everyone who flies retracts has a different way of making sure that gear is down the standard gump check gas undercarriage mixture prop is as good as any to that I add my own on short final I say out loud final landing check the gear is down then I check not just the handle position but any mechanical down indicators including the green lights a lot of these gear up landings are instructor induced which is to say they happen while training to handle gear emergencies to avoid making a mess in that situation when training anything to do with the landing gear where landing may be planned I keep my hand on the gear handle switch the entire time as a reminder to make no kidding sure whether the wheels are up or down one last thing if you're ever faced with an unavoidable $50,000 slide down the runway don't forget to smile someone's probably filming it bribe web I'm Paul burger le thanks for watching in the description below you can see links to some of the videos I credit [Music]

Channel: AVweb

Views: 590,531

Rating: 4.9051232 out of 5

Keywords: Ger-up landings, AVweb, retractable, emergency landing, aircraft accidents, belly slide, twin-engine, landing gear, wheels, aircraft

Id: B9ot2YxPHdE

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/cinghialino]

nice video!