Originally Posted by
jolihokistix
Built into the fuselage somehow?
How is that going to help, when on nearly all 'low wing' installations the engines extend well below the bottom of the fuselage? What you're proposing is not meaningfully different than the fixed landing gear arrangement that was abandoned for commercial transports ~80 years ago.
Better to figure out a way to keep the pilots from attempting wheels up landings. Since aural alerts can (and have been) be ignored, I keep thinking about an old James Bond movie: There was some 'game' that shocked the player when they were losing. Maybe we need a system like that - if the pilot is doing something really stupid such as landing wheels up or CFIT - it's starts shocking the PF to get their attention.
I have a vague memory of a story about 727 pilots being clever with the flaps in flight from years ago that would illustrate that point, but can't find a reference at the moment
There is considerable controversy about this incident: It happened in 1979, TWA Flight 841, Hoot Gibson was the PF (I remember this because I met a different Hoot Gibson - Space Shuttle Astronaut - with the associated name confusion). Anyway, the story was you could get lower cruise drag/better fuel burn on a 727 by extending the trailing edge flaps - except to make it work you needed to disable the leading edge devices first. Allegedly, Hoot and company did this while the flight engineer was in the toilet - when he returned to the flight deck he noticed that the leading edge device CB's were out so he restored them. One side extended, the other side jammed due to the aero loads and the asymmetric lift rolled them into a dive. They were only able to recover when the extended leading edge ripped off. The controversy was (short story) that the flight crew claimed they were scapegoats - that the leading edge device extended uncommanded, while the official report basically says what I described.
It didn't help the flight crew's story when they erased the voice recorder after they landed
