"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
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.
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.
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?

I'd have made the same decision as you - stick with what seems to be a
pretty good situation (instead of risking cycling the gear and ending up
worse off), get the tower to have a shufti at your dangly bits, and on
receiving a promising report from them, attempt a gentle approach, holding
the nose off for as long as is practical.

The only thing I'd be tempted to do in addition, assuming your airfield is
big enough, you're experienced enough, and there's enough time to make it a
reasonably safe manoeuvre, is to make a power-off, glide landing, and to get
the second pair of hands in the cockpit (in this case your student) to crank
the propeller with the starter so it's roughly horizontal and thus won't
bash the runway. A prop strike will generally shock-load the engine and
necessitate a complete strip down.

This said, the usual rules apply: if in doubt, take the approach that is
most likely to get you walk away from the "landing", and if that means
shock-loading the engine, so be it.

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).

First rule of declaring an emergency: never, ever be afraid to do it. The
ATC people would rather you promptly report something that turns out to be a
false alarm, as it gives them more time to figure out what to do with that
line of 767s that's coming up fast behind you than would be the case if you
landed with a nasty splat on only 66.67% of your wheels. And even if the
fire crew's talents aren't needed, they get a bit of training value out of
the exercise. Of course, if you do it three times a week because of poor
maintenance, they have the right to be peeved :-)

D.