The time I landed an aircraft gear-up

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I mentioned this in passing in another thread, and was asked for details.

The aircraft was my own Grob Astir CS sailplane.

It started when I arrived back at the airport with gobs and gobs of altitude. Like 10,000’ I needed to burn off.

So I opened the spoilers and dropped the nose, which will burn 1000+ fpm.

My airplane is equipped with a gear warning system. This turns on an obnoxious buzzer if the spoilers are opened while the gear is up. So these thing is blaring away, and it occurs to me that I can make the noise stop by dropping the gear, which will also increase drag, which is fine.

Since the outcome is in the thread title, you can probably work out the rest, but I’ll finish it:

Once I was near pattern altitude, I closed the spoilers. As I entered the pattern, I went into my normal landing routine, except normally my routine would start with the gear up, but now it is down, so I raised it in preparation for landing.

I then completed a landing. My saint of a flight instructor, Hal Bonney, had drilled “Always land European gliders tail first” so I touched down with minimum energy. When I dropped below normal attitude and heard the belly grinding on the runway, I initially thought the gear had collapsed, because I clearly remembered lowering it. (I had raised it)

As near as I can figure, my brain got conditioned to tune out the gear warning horn during the decent. I did not become aware of the sound until after the airplane had ground (heh!) to a halt.

It was only finding the gear doors closed that it dawned on me that the gear had not collapsed, and I was able to work out what I had actually done.

The damage was absolutely minimal. I was able to do the repair myself, overseen by an A&P. The paint work was the major expense.

2

Fascinating. Rather like those comedy routines where one person says something like “Yes, you did!”
The other says, “No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I…OOPS!”

In other words, your brain learning by rote the action which toggles you from state A to state B or back again, rather than to being aware of the state. On some level, it’s just easier to keep a one-time action in memory storage rather than multiple checks of a state over time (because those are multiple actions).

3

And then there was the time, on the other hand, that my instructor had me try my very first simulated rope break on take-off. Having not practiced it at altitude, I had no idea how steeply I was supposed to bank to turn around. Half way through the turn, my instructor says, “Let me take over”, and proceeded to land us in the adjacent cow pasture.

ETA: That was almost 40 years ago! Alas, that glider port, surrounding cow pastures, and all that was there for miles around, is now shopping malls and lite-industrial “parks”.

4

There is a video on youtube of someone landing wheels up with the horn blaring. All I can think is that they had become so focused on the task at hand that they tuned out the horn. Ignoring aural input is common when you become overloaded. Sometimes when someone is focused on a task they won’t hear you talk to them, you may need to touch them on the shoulder to get them to “snap out of it”. People who have never experienced something similar can find it hard to understand how it can happen.

5

That’s cool Kevbo - thanks for sharing it.

6

Here. :wink:

7

And this one. In the video Elvis posted, look at the runway and the lay of the land. There is rising terrain all around the airport and it is an approach that you need to get just right. For someone unfamiliar to the area it would be daunting and require a lot of brain space to get right. In the brain’s attempt to dedicate the most “processing power” to the tasks it “thinks” are most important it essentially drops hearing out of the loop.

8

Auditory exclusion is a common symptom of extreme stress.

9

One other factor I forgot to mention: They don’t really make gliders to fit 6’5" me. The length of my forearm means that the seat back interferes with my elbow preventing me from raising/locking the gear unless I twist around in a particular way. I had assumed this would make it all but impossible to inadvertently raise the gear.

But this was a very bumpy day, and I remember taking a big bump just as I was “lowering” the gear. I am pretty sure there was enough negative G that the gear raised itself once I unlocked it.
After the subject incident, I would nudge the stick forward to get a little negative g to assist with raising the gear, thus avoiding the “assume the position” drill. So I not only learned about my human failings, but also a handy trick.

10

I wonder… would it make more sense to have a voice warning as well? “Warning! Landing gear is up!”

11

Did you remember the First Rule of Gear-Up Landings? Flip the switch to Down before anybody else notices, then look mystified.

12

I’m going to vote-- Not really.

I’m not a pilot, but I can relate to the being so focused you don’t notice noise around you (and to the feeling of I know someone is talking to me, but I can’t quite make out what they are saying . . . let me finish X and then I can listen).

13

Some of the more modern aircraft do exactly that. F-16 birdstrike: at 0:21, cockpot alert sternly warns pilot, “gear NOT down” a couple of times. Not that it helped in this particular case. :smiley:

14

On the F/A-18, the voice (female, it gets pilots’ attention better for some reason) is nicknamed “Bitchin’ Betty”. She’s always complaining about *something *being wrong.

15

I think there are maybe a couple of motor gliders (Stemme??) that have power actuated landing gear, but most have a direct mechanical linkage, meaning the pilot’s muscles actually move the gear, so there is no way to move the lever without first raising the beast off the ground.

The entire gear warning system is two reed switches, a fuse, and a sonalert buzzer. Uses zero power when silent, which matters when the radio and instruments are powered only by a small rechargeable battery.

16

I’ve been in a plane that was landed with the gear up, but it was a float plane and you’re supposed to do it that way.

Which is another interesting part of pilot psychology. If you’ve got amphibious floats[sup]*[/sup], you want those wheels up before you touch the water. But it’s such a ingrained part of pilot training to put the wheels down before landing that sometimes they do get it wrong.

  • In case it wasn’t obvious from the context, amphibious floats are those with wheels built in that can operate from land or water. If you know you’re only going to be on water, you can get straight floats; less to go wrong, cheaper, lighter, etc.
17

I think the landing gear is like that in most planes, powered or not. It’s designed to be over-center (I think that’s the term) when it’s fully extended. If you tried to retract the gear while you’re on the ground, the plane would have to raise up a little bit before coming down with its belly on the tarmac. Then you just make sure that your hydraulic pump (or whatever retracts the gear) isn’t strong enough to lift the plane.

It’s a nice safety feature, in case anyone accidentally hits the switch when they shouldn’t.

18

A bit like this(scene from The IT Crowd)

19

Business turboprop.
3 pilots on board.
IFR conditions at destination.
At or just under minimums.
They were fat on fuel.
Started taking turns making the approach.
On the 5th or 6th try, the preceding pilot had retracted the gear for the go around.
They had been just leaving it down.
Yepper, all three did not snap to the gear warning horn.
Real expensive practice.
Wasn’t me but I knew one of the pilots.
He did not like to talk about it much.

20

I always did a GUMP check in the Skyhawk, even though ‘U’ and ‘P’ didn’t apply. Still I’d look out the window and say ‘Undercarriage: Down and welded’ and ‘Prop: Yes.’