Big Pistons Forever wrote:Just to be absolutely clear my posts was meant to indicate two things
1) A B model King Air 90 would be a nearly 50 year old airframe and it is my experience that the last stop before the boneyard for an old beater King Air is a skydving operation. Writing off this airframe before it suffers some major inflight calamity and injures/kills some folks, is not IMO a bad thing.
2) The pay to fly pilot will I presume be fired and hopefully not get hired elsewhere which means that he got away with a demonstration of his incompetence without hurting anyone, again IMO ,a good thing.
Obviously in a perfect world this scenario should never unfold, but this is the real world and there could have been far worse outcomes here.
To make my posts REALLY EFFING clear. i don't believe that writing off an airframe because you are too facking stoopid to put the gear down is NOT a good thing! It is a very BAD thing.
IMHO, it's also a BAD thing to consider it NOT a BAD thing.
Sorry BPF, we're not on the same team on this one.
CID wrote:I think that if TC was to do an informal check among various light twin operators, they would find that many of them have non-functioning gear horns.
The horns on many of these were crappy to begin with and pilots and maintainers alike don't seem to think they are important. When I read the post about MEL I let out a little giggle.
My King Air days were quite a long time ago and not that much overall time in the machine so this info could possibly not be completely correct.
The one I flew had an electro-hydraulic gear system but apparently this is a modification from an earlier mechanical gear system. There is a large hidden CB on the floor under the captains seat. It pops on occasion and there have been some gear up landings where the only problem was that the CB was popped and that is why the gear did not come down instead of what the pilot assumed to be a mechanical failure. Now if remember correctly, there was a nitrogen bottle to blow the gear down if the hydraulics had leaked out.
Correct me if the above is wrong. Its been a while.
The King Air is also susceptible to frozen brakes which happened once after taking off in a few inches of snow. It made for an interesting landing and flat spotted our tires on one side. We did not have bleed air heating to the brakes like some of the aircraft.
A B model King Air 90 would be a nearly 50 year old airframe and it is my experience that the last stop before the boneyard for an old beater King Air is a skydving operation. Writing off this airframe before it suffers some major inflight calamity and injures/kills some folks, is not IMO a bad thing.
King Airs are known for inflight breakups?
2) The pay to fly pilot will I presume be fired and hopefully not get hired elsewhere which means that he got away with a demonstration of his incompetence without hurting anyone, again IMO ,a good thing.
What do you personally know about that pilot and his flying ability that allows you to make such a definitive statement?
Pilots make mistakes, does that mean end their career because they made a mistake?
crazy horse wrote:I get that, I thought he was referring to this post by Big Pistons Forever. "A doubtlessly POS ancient King Air is written off and its pilot gets to go home before he hurts anyone at his pay to fly job. It really is "win - win" "
Doc takes this pretty seriously. I wouldn't mess with him on this.
I've never landed gear up, but I've seen a number of times when the swiss cheese almost lined up. I was on a Herc and we'd completed the landing checklist; when the power came back for the base turn, the gear horn went off. LOUD horn! We looked sheepishly around at each other, put the gear down, and ran the checklist again. All 3 of us learned a valuable lesson that day.
I knew a guy who once called the gear "down and locked" without looking at the gear handle or indicators. I asked "Is it?" The guy looked at it and turned white when he saw it was up.
There's them who have, and those who haven't yet. Nobody wants to join this club.
Sidebar wrote:There's them who have, and those who haven't yet. Nobody wants to join this club.
Horseshit.
There's them who have, and will again, and again.
And then there's them who pay attention to what they are doing.
I have to agree with BigPistonsForever on this one: What happened was a best case scenario. You couldn't have asked for a better outcome under the circumstances.
Boy, you guys are being so cruel. This pilot was a victim. Just a poor guy trying to get that all important turbine PIC time.
We should all celebrate the learning experience, after all, except for a very large majority of us, we have either landed gear up or are going to. Definitely the truth there.
It was an old plane. No one got hurt. Heck , good job is not really fitting here. "Great job"!!
Lets give this poor guy all the support we can. It was not incompetence. It was just what happens.
If pilots are going to advance their careers we must expect this type of accident.
No need to be ashamed or doubt your awesome flying talents. Anyone could miss a little insignificant pre landing checklist item confirming the gear was down.
I am sure he will include this accident on his resume, and share it with the interviewers when he gets asked the. "Tell us one time when...." Definitely an experience companies will consider valuable.
Kudos to the company for their careful selection of new hires, awesome and thorough training, and, of course, the high pay..they got a pilot who did a .....did I mention it before?...a great job
Doc, I could name 3 I've encountered. But I won't. I can also name a few who defer things they shouldn't but I won't. I also know of a pilot (at least he says he's a pilot) who admits to breaking regulations but I don't know what your real name is so what's the point?
CID wrote:Doc, I could name 3 I've encountered. But I won't. I can also name a few who defer things they shouldn't but I won't. I also know of a pilot (at least he says he's a pilot) who admits to breaking regulations but I don't know what your real name is so what's the point?
He is no poor victim he owns his own 182. One that he has crashed. The only reason he is not fired is because they are using his 182 for jump ops. This place pays nothing but requires 1000h and an FAA ticket. No poor saps trying to get multi time only whores who will work for free. The saps are people who hire these people to fly there machines.
Seems like a perfect pilot for the naked thrillseekers that hang around drop zones.
Pax brief could start with a quote from any Clint Eastwood movie "well punk,do you feel lucky"
followed by the fistful of dollars whistle.Great entertainment.
The more crashes maybe they will give him a neat drop zone nick name.
There can only be one CRASH BRANNIGAN at a time at any one particular drop zone, but lots of hamsters for some reason.Balloonists need not apply.
Do not forget the seagrams aftershave (do not drink it ,just splash it behind your ears ) to add some fear to those not scared enough by the thought of jumping out of an airplane.The abilty to fart just before the door opens is a skill that should pay extra, as anyone hesitant about jumping from a good airplane will be so glad for a gasp of non-polluted non-toxic air they will jump out quickly and increase aircraft utilization for the day.
I need some clarification here. When a pilot lands with gear up he and survives unscathed, he is ridiculed and called names like "twit". I assume this is to demoralize him even more. When a pilot lands with gear down in water but dies, even though in my opinion its an equally preventable accident, the ridicule is saved. Why is that?
When a pilot dies, the ridicule is saved. Why is that?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I ridicule
anyone that is stupid. I don't discriminate
on the basis of life or death. I'm pretty sure
that would be both politically incorrect, and
a violation of their Charter Rights.
I find it strange,a guy lands gear up and everyone is on him...another takes off in a beaver and crashes because of no fuel and every one thinks he is a hero.....
Very few people land gear up on a perfectly normal landing (anyone who does is stupid I guess). Normally, it happens when something changes or was out of the ordinary. If something disrupts your thought process precisely when you are doing your gear check, for example, your brain can skip over it thinking the gear has already been verified. There is not even any nagging doubt because as far as your brain is concerned it has done the check already. Distractions are constant, and it is easy to say "don't get distracted" but hard to actually do it.
When you do a GUMP check, are you consciously checking every item, every single time, or does your brain gloss over certain items because it has already decided you completed them earlier? Even at the end of a 14 hour day, landing at an unfamiliar airport, when you get a last minute runway change? If you've done a gear check 1,000 times before and 1,000 times the gear was in the expected position, are you even open to the possibility that this time it may not be?
If we simply throw up our hands and say any pilot who lands gear up is stupid, just as many airplanes will get bent next year. It has far more to do with human factors than simply stupid vs smart.
A346Dude wrote:Very few people land gear up on a perfectly normal landing (anyone who does is stupid I guess). Normally, it happens when something changes or was out of the ordinary. If something disrupts your thought process precisely when you are doing your gear check, for example, your brain can skip over it thinking the gear has already been verified. There is not even any nagging doubt because as far as your brain is concerned it has done the check already. Distractions are constant, and it is easy to say "don't get distracted" but hard to actually do it.
When you do a GUMP check, are you consciously checking every item, every single time, or does your brain gloss over certain items because it has already decided you completed them earlier? Even at the end of a 14 hour day, landing at an unfamiliar airport, when you get a last minute runway change? If you've done a gear check 1,000 times before and 1,000 times the gear was in the expected position, are you even open to the possibility that this time it may not be?
If we simply throw up our hands and say any pilot who lands gear up is stupid, just as many airplanes will get bent next year. It has far more to do with human factors than simply stupid vs smart.
