A telling bit of intra-cockpit communication that you’ll never get the chance to hear if you’re flying single seat aviation:
“Yes, I know, but I thought you were going to put the landing gear down this time. And yes, those are fire trucks, and yes they’re coming our way.”
Shipmates,
One of my Division Officers lost his wings over a similar situation, although thankfully there was no pranging of aircraft with ground.
The week prior, a reserve bird, a P-3B from, I believe, VP-93, came in wheels up at Jax International and closed the active for quite a bit of time. They’d been doing a number of crach and dash to let various Peep’s get their monthly quals and in all the conversation and seat swapping, that little part of the landing checklist about 3 down and locked was over looked… until the pro tips started to ping the asphalt…
Anyway, even after everyone in the community got a good look at the films, the next week my DO and several other folks are up at NAS Brunswick on a pilot trainer, and while discussing 1-engine out landing procedures and various other emergency approach things, they also managed to skip over the landing gear bit.
Now, it was caught in plenty of time, but scuttlebutt had it that this was just the latest in a list of “incidents” that the LtJG had been involved in, and we never saw him again. well, actually, he was mentioned in an AFRTS TV broadcast a few months later, and me and 2 others ran into him in DC, but that’s for another day….
Respects,
AW1 Tim
(former)
Say hello to the folks at FASO for me! (Back “in the day”, they used to allow non-aviation types to come tour the simulator… Read: They let us Grunts of the Marine Barracks come over and play with their toy…)
I actually had a significant number of hours at the controls of a simulated P3C… It was good…
Shipmate,
Small world. I missed when the Marines were removed from NASB. They started having “security” and Shore Patrol do all the work, and it just wasn’t the same… sigh …
Yeah, the FASO guys were an interesting lot. They had both the simulator for the flight station, and the whole rest of the stations “the tube” as it was called, hooked up so you could do some pretty damned good training in their.
I have to tell you that it was always pretty comforting to know there was a Marine detachment on base. We had some good-natured rivalries, but I do remember closing ranks with you fellows a couple times against visiting Army and Airforce types at the club.
respects from the (still) frozen north,
AW1 Tim
(former)
You know you’ve landed gear-up when it takes military power to taxi to the ramp…
Student Pilot: “Gee that’s a short runway!”
Instructor: “Yes, but look how wide it is!”
You’ve probably got *that* cartoon framed…
And people wonder why NATOPS required you to have those little checklists in the cockhouse!?!
*perk*
“checklists in the cockhouse”
huh.
I’ve always thought you boys had pin-ups in the cockhouse….
WK – The pinups can be reduced to fit into a checklist binder.
Dunno if *your* pic would fit without a “Continued on the following page” caveat, though…
*grinnnn*
So now we know why Lex REALLY wanted to fly single seaters…
Land with the gear up, no one to bother you about it
Leave the place for five minutes to get some work done on the taxpayer dime and look what happens.
Not. Touching. It.
“Not. Touching. It.”
What? The checklist or the pinup?
heheh
- hfs
Oh, Jason. You land with the gear up in a single seater? There will be a very great deal of bother, trust me.
After all, there aren’t any excuses. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done…
HFS – not touching any of it. I’ve learned a bit, along the way. Just enough, maybe.