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Old March 30th 04, 05:25 PM
Roy Smith
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Default Would you cycle the gear?

I had an interesting experience the other day.

I was with a student in one of our club Arrows. We put the gear down
and got green lights for the 2 mains, but not for the nose.

The nose green light was flashing, as was the yellow "gear in transit"
light. Both were flashing about twice per second, and in opposition
(i.e. as the green went on, the yellow went off, and vice versa).

We ran the checklists in the POH, but did not try to cycle the gear. My
theory at the time was that since we had indication of both mains down
and locked, we should probably not mess with things any more.

On the one hand, cycling it might have fixed whatever was wrong.

On the other hand, what we had now (both mains down and locked) was not
only a survivable configuration, but one which would result in
relatively minor damage if the nose gear was indeed not locked (prop
strike). If something was jammed mechanically, cycling it could have
possibly resulted in no gear at all, or (worse) asymmetric extension).

We told the tower what was going on and requested a low pass so they
could look under the plane to see what was there. Tower reported all
three gear appeared to be down, so I just landed as gently as I could.
I was relieved when everything held together.

The maintenance people were unable to reproduce the problem and the
plane was returned to service. Best guess is a slight misalignment of
one of the limit switches.

What would you have done? Would you have cycled the gear hoping to fix
the problem, or would you have accepted the possible unlocked nosegear
in exchange for the known locked mains?

For those that are worried about such things, the outfall of our
declaring an emergency was about 2 minutes worth of paperwork. The fire
truck followed us to the ramp and the crew asked us a couple of
questions for their report. The tower also shut the runway until the
airport operations folks did a FOD inspection and declared it open again
(which must have taken all of about a minute).