My son played a baseball game this week near Dulles Airport and we had departing planes flying over the field every few minutes. I noticed that nearly every one had retracted the rear landing gear but still had the nose gear out.
Does nose gear not retract? Or if so, is there some reason that it is left out long into the departure path after the rear gear are up (let’s say 2-3 minutes at least)? These were all commercial passenger jets near as I could tell.
Was it really 2 - 3 minutes? The landing gear retract is all done with one lever, you can leave everything down or you can put everything up, but you can’t just retract the main (rear) gear as far as I know. It’s not unusual for the retract cycle to retract the main gear first then the nose gear, but the delay would be measured in seconds not minutes.
Yeah, I don’t think you saw what you think you saw. The nose gear comes up seconds after the main gear for no real reason other than that’s the way the electronics are designed. Perhaps you just happened to be in the right spot to see the planes in those in-between seconds.
As others have said, there’s just one knob/lever/switch in the cockpit for the whole gear system.
Which gear retracts first or last is part of the design. It seems common that mains go up first, followed a couple seconds later by nose. I’d imagine the design issue is that the hydraulic system isn’t big enough to power them all at once, and getting the mains up first gives the greatest aerodynamic drag reduction soonest.
On any jet I’ve ever seen or flown the max delay from mains fully up & doors closed to nose fully up and closed is on the order of 5 seconds, and usually less.
There could be a bit of an optical illusion going on as well; the flight path of the planes might be such that while the nose gear is being retracted, the angle of the plane is making it appear as though the gear is still down when viewed from certain points on the ground. On most planes, some part of the gear “sticks out” until the very end of the process (and the doors close last), so it might look like there’s more of it exposed than there really is.
Maybe what I saw was not nose gear. But here is what I saw.
I saw at least 5 planes fly over. A plane would come into view perhaps 1-2 minutes after leaving the runway. I could very definitely see that the doors for the rear gear were closed in each case. I could also see something under the nose that looked like landing gear to me but I could have been mistaken. The plane remained visible to be for another 1-2 minutes and I did not any movement of whatever I saw under the nose.
Next time I will make a point to come back with photos.
I am not a pilot, but I spent 2 summers with a window desk at work watching planes take off; the vast majority had their gear fully retracted before they even turned off the runway centreline…they were not waiting 1-2 minutes before starting the process.
Were these all different planes? Could a single plane be having gear problems and be doing flybys on the airport to have people on the ground report the status of the gear positioning to the pilot? Perhaps they were actually arriving, but the main gear wasn’t descending, and they needed to work on getting them to drop?
A jet departing/climbing at whatever speed they are doing would be miles away even one minute after passing overhead. Maybe your time estimates are off? Perhaps one our pilot members could tells us how high and how far from the departure end of the runway they would be two minutes after take-off.
Be discreet. In this day and age, taking of photos of airplanes isn’t always taken as easily as it once was.
That, you see, is why I asked the question, because I thought it was odd. These were not flybys, these were different planes (all different models).
Here is a map that shows the airport, plus where I was, which is about 6 miles south.
It is odd. All I can think is that you are mistaken in what you are seeing. The landing gear is normally selected up as soon as a positive rate of climb is identified after take-off and the retract cycle is generally completed before the aeroplane is even two hundred feet off the ground, they often haven’t reached the end of the runway by this point.
At times a commercial jet may leave its gear down after take-off if the brake temperatures are high, but all of the gear would be down in that case, not just the nose gear. It is also possible for the nose gear to remain extended if the pin that prevents it from being inadvertently retracted on the ground is left in place, the chance of this happening to multiple consecutive aircraft is remote.