426 Gear-Up Landings & Gear Collapses: How to Prevent Them with Tom Turner + GA News

Gear-up landings are often dismissed as embarrassing pilot mistakes, but landing gear mishaps are far more common, complicated, and expensive than many pilots realize. In this episode, Max talks with Tom Turner of the American Bonanza Society Air Safety Foundation about why gear-up landings and landing gear collapses continue to happen—and the operating habits and maintenance practices that can prevent them.

Turner says the Beechcraft Bonanza, Baron, Debonair, and Travel Air fleet averages about one reported landing gear mishap every week. Those events represent roughly 40 percent of the mishaps reported to the American Bonanza Society. And because many landing gear events do not meet NTSB reporting thresholds, Turner says contacts in the insurance, aircraft rebuilding, and salvage industries believe the actual number may be two to three times higher.

The problem is not unique to Beechcraft. Turner previously tracked landing gear events across piston retractable-gear aircraft and found comparable or even higher rates in some other types. Landing gear mishaps also have an outsized impact on aircraft insurance because a seemingly survivable gear-up landing can result in propeller damage, an engine teardown, belly damage, and repair costs high enough for an insurer to total the airplane.

Much of the conversation focuses on developing habits that make forgetting the landing gear less likely. Turner teaches the concept "gear down to go down." Rather than beginning the final descent simply by reducing power, landing gear extension becomes the event that initiates the descent from traffic pattern altitude or onto the final portion of an instrument approach.

He also teaches Gear Extension Altitude, or GEA. On a straight-in or other nonstandard arrival, the pilot selects an altitude below which the airplane will not descend until the landing gear has been extended and confirmed.

Max relates two occasions during his flying career when normal landing gear cues broke down. In one, while training in a Diamond DA42, he reached the flare before his instructor revealed that the gear was still up. In another, while flying a Vision Jet instrument approach, the normal glidepath cue used for gear extension never appeared. The airplane's warning system ultimately caught the omission.

That leads to one of Turner's strongest recommendations: regardless of when you normally extend the landing gear, establish a deliberate final gear confirmation on short final, around 400 to 500 feet AGL. If distraction, a changed traffic pattern, a go-around, or some other interruption causes you to miss your normal extension cue, that final check provides one more opportunity to catch the error.

Warning systems alone are not enough. Turner describes pilots who continued toward landing while gear warning horns sounded and bright warning lights flashed. During high workload, pilots may simply stop processing repetitive warnings. In multi-engine training, the problem can become particularly insidious because pilots may listen to a landing gear warning horn throughout a simulated engine-out exercise and effectively tune it out before landing.

Turner recommends using more than cockpit lights to verify the gear. Listen to the gear motor and notice whether it sounds normal. Feel and observe the expected change in drag and pitch. Compare airspeed, power, descent rate, and aircraft performance with what you normally expect. Then verify the cockpit indications. ABS even recommends holding the gear handle until this entire confirmation process is complete.

Go-arounds introduce another human-factors trap. Pilots may vividly remember extending the gear—but the memory may be from the previous trip around the pattern. Turner favors making a go-around resemble a normal takeoff, then using the same normal extension cue on the next approach. Whatever technique a pilot chooses, the key is consistency and making sure the cue will still occur following a go-around.

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