Originally Posted by
excrab
As I said in an earlier post, it is a couple of years since I’ve been to Karachi, but every time I went there the tower controller always said something along the lines of “surface wind blah blah blah, cleared to land check gear down and locked” The problem is they generally cleared us to land well before intercepting the glide slope so we didn’t have the gear down and locked. But we never told them that, just acknowledged the clearance and followed our SOPs as to when configure for landing.
I think I read somewhere on about page 1000 of this thread that they didn’t talk to the tower, but even if they did, if they were told to “check gear down and locked”, and were regular visitors to Karachi they would possibly have been in the habit of ignoring the call anyway, even if they heard it.
I think you raise an interesting points about habits that may be formed regardless of the intent of the procedures in place. (Such as the tower reminding inbound planes to check gear ...).
Years ago I got the usual bottle of scotch (for stopping a gear up pass) from my flight student - he had gotten into the habit of reporting the gear down without looking to see. They usually were, but, on this occasion, he gave me three different reports of the gear down (and the flaps were down on the last two). But the gear indicators all said "up" - we were getting this little warning horn going off in our head sets. As he rolled final and reported his gear down the third time to me I instructed him to wave off (go around).
When pilots report the gear down, what process have we gone through to ensure ourselves that it is in fact down before we say the words? (I think that is what Pilot(DAR) was alluding to a few posts up).
If we are making the report as a reflex, or as you suggest,
because the tower wants to hear it, then it sort of defeats the purpose.