Sad story about landing an amphibious seaplane in the water with the gear down

by philg

Apropos of the question of whether 20-hour pilots can fly an amphibious seaplane, such as the Icon A5, safely, here’s a sad video of what happens when a 4000-hour pilot forgets to retract the gear prior to landing: http://www.aopa.org/asf/video/no-greater-burden.html

[Update January 2018: link seems to have rotted; these AOPA guys are going to make American aviation great, but they can’t preserve functional links on their own web site? The video seems to be on YouTube.]

5 thoughts on “Sad story about landing an amphibious seaplane in the water with the gear down”

  1. That is tough story to watch. It really shows how easy it is to be DISTRACTED big time due to outside events. Sure makes one appreciate the difficulty of commercial pilots flying on low sleep due to strange sleeping arrangements or short turn arounds and other side issues. My friends went to listen to Sulley Sullenberger last night. I wonder what his reaction would be to this film..

    I wonder how many car wrecks could be traced to similar issues.

    Bill

  2. Phil–

    The story is terribly sad, of course. I couldn’t watch it– I decided to read the story instead.

    No doubt the cost-benefit analysis is not easy but can you think of a straightforward engineering solution to this problem?

  3. Very hard viewing. It gave me a sudden urge to go and read accident investigation reports to find out more about the mistakes I don’t want to be making. Also, it does sound a little like a human-machine interface problem; given this mistake has such instant and catastrophic consequences, wouldn’t it make sense to give the plane a little extra intelligence, such that it would either give a hard-to-miss warning or actually re-configure the landing gear itself?

  4. Bob, Ed: I think that his plane was equipped with an annunciator that said something like “gear is down for runway landing”. Some years ago I think I wrote that what was needed was a system in which if one were not landing at one of the 13,000 or so public airports in the U.S., or any private landing strip that had been added to a database, the avionics would scream “wheels are down and you’re about to land in the water and flip over”.

    The terrain warning systems have this capability. They suppress their normally very urgent warnings if one is approaching a known runway. So it can be done, but I don’t think anyone has ever done it for the tiny market of amphibious seaplanes.

  5. I head the bit about the annunciator – if the cockpit had been sterile, I’m sure it would have done the job. I had in mind your more strident “wheels are down and you’re about to land in the water and flip over”; as you say, the market must be tiny, but it does sound like a pretty nice feature to have, and very inexpensive to implement, especially given what you say about other alerts being suppressed close to known runways.

    The video was very well done; the culture of learning from accidents is a very good feature of the aviation community, and it would be nice to see it transferring to boaters and drivers.

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