Preventing Gear-Up Landings

Ryan Motte

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 03:26 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Most gear-up landings are preventable pilot errors ("forgetting") rather than mechanical failures, often caused by a chain of factors like task saturation, distractions, fatigue, and deviations from routine procedures.
Contributing factors frequently include alarm fatigue, where pilots become desensitized to gear warning alarms due to sensory overload or routine disarming.
Prevention relies heavily on consistent adherence to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), such as GUMPS checks and verbal confirmations (e.g., "three green down and locked"), and proactively recognizing and adapting to non-standard approach situations.
Maintaining pilot proficiency and recognizing when to go around are crucial strategies to avoid these costly incidents, which often result in significant damage.

See a mistake? Contact us.

I have been around the airport water cooler for two different gear-up landings. The first was either a classic excuse or truly unfortunate set of circumstances. After touching the belly of the aircraft to the pavement without a nice, cushy set of wheels between the two, he hopped out of the airplane and declared that the reason he landed gear-up was due to a bee in the cockpit. I never asked if he was allergic to bees, but either way, if his story is true, that little insect caused a lot of damage.

The second story involved a pilot who evacuated his aircraft believing he selected the gear down and it must have collapsed when he landed. After the dust settled, he looked inside the cockpit and found the smoking gun; the gear handle settled in the up position.