Few students start learning to fly in retractable-gear airplanes, but a good many aspire to move up to them. Even if they’re not thinking about it yet, retractable gear could well be in their future. While the engineers at Cirrus concluded that the added weight largely offsets the reduction in drag, the fact remains that most high-performance airplanes are retracts, as are most twins. Aspiring commercial pilots still have to log at least 10 hours of complex time, and to a lot of us, retractable gear is just sexier.
Naturally, there are trade-offs. Owners plan to pay more for maintenance and repairs; operators pay more for insurance. By reputation, at least, fixed gear is less vulnerable to damage from less-than-graceful landings. And, of course, picking the wheels up raises the question of putting them down again. Mechanical problems can prevent the gear from extending, and every backup system (including free-fall) has been known to fail. But here, too, pilots fail their airplanes far more often than airplanes fail pilots. When the gear doesn’t go down, it’s usually because the pilot didn’t put it down.
This is pretty remarkable given that the airplanes usually tried to remind them. Horns blow and panel lights flash if the gear is still up when the airspeed gets slow. Before things reach that point, the pilot’s already missed that crucial item on the checklist—or neglected to run it at all—and overlooked the ritual GUMPS check. At that point, warning systems may not help.
In early 2011, the pilots of a Beechcraft Bonanza and a Piper Comanche claimed their noise-cancelling headsets kept them from hearing the gear horn. Others, including high-time pilots in high-end aircraft, mistook them for other alarms. Witness the 3,000-hour pilot of a Socata TBM 700 who “…wanted to land before it was dark ...[and] forgot to lower the landing gear…. The airplane was equipped with a landing gear configuration warning, which activated during landing; however, the pilot mistook it for a different warning indicator.” In a $2 million airplane, that’s expensive as well as embarrassing.
So if experience doesn’t grant immunity and warning systems can be overlooked, what’s the answer? Staying ahead of the airplane is one key; distraction figures prominently in gear-up landings. Remembering what you’re flying helps. And rigorous adherence to checklists—double-checking each critical item—can help prevent that awful scraping noise.
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