Originally Posted by
ObadiahDogberry
If you ever fly at an airport that has a tower staffed by U.S. Air Force controllers, they always make the call "check gear down" as part of issuing their landing clearance.
Which is fine when landing at a USAF base but not very applicable to commercial flying. And if you want to give the USAF controllers a rise, you can do as my instructor did (I was flying Hueys at the time, he was a Marine) when we came in to land after an instrument approach into an Air Force Base. When told to "check gear down" he responded with "Two down and welded."
Pilot(DAR) makes a good point about discipline and habit forming; the crew training that most airlines do is intended to do that same thing - establish reliable patterns as well as to form, and reinforce good habits.
Likewise, the training for how to set one's self up for a stabilized approach long before you get to the five miles out point is intended to form good and reliable habits.
Those habits and those disipline building measures seem to have not helped in this case.
The exam question to be answered is: why?
What interfered with that?
Where's the CVR? That may provide some answers.
One of our controller contributors has pointed out that a full transcrip of R/T may paint a slightly different picture than the excerpts so far available.
Hoping to see that as well.
As an aside: a friend of mine flies A320's for an American carrier, and has had very few trips in the last two months. Is hoping to get some sim time to keep the rust off. When I asked about this accident, all I got was an eye roll and this - "Putting the gear down is a key to a successful landing, even
you know that.
"