Landing Gear

Posted on | August 17, 2008 | 2 Comments

Landing Gear

Pax jets sometimes land without deploying landing gear. Is there no failsafe system to prevent this?

Pilots have a heavy workload on approach & landing. Pilots are human and make mistakes. Pilots are more tired at the end of long flights. Human error is the largest contributory factor in air crashes.
This type of crash is rare but can not technology prevent it?

There is.
When the aircraft is slowed down by pulling the power back below cruise power, and if any of the flaps are deployed past 10 degrees, without the landing gear deployed, the landing gear horn will go off. This is a large pitched alert system to tell the pilot that the gear is up, in a landing configuration.
Altough gear up landings are rare, sometimes they are required, Such as the King air that landed with the gear up in ATL due to the landing gear not extending properly. Most small aircraft and even most airliners are built with skid plates (extra reiforced metal) on the bottom of the fuselage to minimize damage to the aicraft. But unfortualy some pilots with all the warnings still forget to put the landing gear down, and one case said " I couldnt think because of the damn gear horn kept going off".
you know you landed gear up when it takes full power to taxi.. hahah

Jet Blue Land with Faulty Landing Gear

On older Semi Truck trailers what do the wheels on the landing gear do?

I've always been baffled by sight of wheels on the landing gear of older truck trailers, what purpose do they serve? Newer trailers don't have them. Any help would be much appreciated.

Whoa... you are really going to test my memory with this one.... LOL

Like you said... they are OLD!!! I have not pulled a trailer manufactured since 1975 (with the exception of Container Platforms) that had wheels on the dolly legs. Trailers built prior to 1975 were not required to have spring brakes on them so when the air bled off, they would roll.

I was told once that it was so when you hooked to one, you would connect your airlines and charge the tanks, hense locking the trailer brakes, prior to hooking the kingpin in the 5th wheel. If you didn't charge the tank(s) on the trailer, you would have to chase the trailer around to get it to latch.

I never understood the logic behind this, because once the air bled off the trailer, it was now sitting on wheels with no brakes to keep it in place.

Hope this helps....

Comments