On 3-Mar-2004, Dave Butler wrote:

Why would you want to disable it?

So you can practice maneuvers near minimum airspeed without the gear
dropping, so the gear doesn't drop when the gear extension pitot gets iced
over
(it's not heated). Of course, here we are talking about disabling it with
the
cockpit control, not by AD.

IIRC from my Piper-flying days, there was an AD to disable the
auto-extension, then the AD was rescinded. While the AD was in effect, it
was disabled on
some airplanes and never re-enabled. So there's a mix of airplanes out
there
with and without the auto gear extension enabled.


The gear extension pitot in our Arrow IV is heated. That aside, I don't
like the auto extension system for a number of reasons. I just leave it in
the override position for most operations.
--
-Elliott Drucker