Originally Posted by
Sir Korsky
Recommended gear up to ditch. Float switch arms collective manual override. Immersion should auto activate floats with float switch on or off.
On the AW139, for the floats to deploy automatically or manually, the system has to be armed. When OFF the floats does not deploy.
The automatic operation will occur at ditching thanks to immersed pressure switch located: one in each main landing gear bay and two in the nose wheel well.
As they are pressure switches, it might not activates automatically if the impact was in inverted flight as possibly mentioned earlier.
Regards,
Jerome