Eclipse Lands Gear up.. an Idea....

I heard that one of the Eclipse test aircraft landed gear up officially due to pilot error.

This is supposed to be a truely smart aircraft...

It has a fully integrated flight control system.
It knows where you are, how high you are, how fast you are,
It should know if the gear is down.
It has a database with airports in it.


If you are within one mile of an airport
if you less than 1000 ft AGL at that airport
if you are heading toward that airport
if you are less than 150 knots
if your gear is still up

Then the gear horn should be so loud that your ears hurt and it makes your fillings fall out.



IMHO The one problem with a traditional power based gear horn is that it is dumb,
It goes off when you are doing things other than landing,such as
descending at low power, practicing stalls, or other wise screwing around.

Since it may go off in non landing normal flight, for safety sake,
it can't be so loud that you can't ignore it.


Eclipse has a "Smart" airplane it can know things like height AGL,
are if you are close to an airport, etc....
So the number of cases where the gear horn goes off when your
not landing can be reduced to zero?


Their horn should curl your hair.


I once fired a flight instructor because he had me out doing slow flight and stalls
with the gear up, whenever the gear horn went off I put the gear down,
he complained that I would not follow his direction.

I explained to him that I never ever wanted to maintain a plane in a flight
condition where the gear horn was on, as I did not want
to become accustomed to that noise.

He was not ok with that I found a different instructor.



Paul