I am told there are two kinds of Pilot.
Those who have landed with the gear still up and those who haven't...........yet.
Sorry, that might have been true 60 years ago, but not today. It's one of those silly statements often trotted out by some (not you, airpolice, I hasten to add - as itwas something you 'were told') to sound wisely avuncular.
In about 10000 hrs, the only wheels-up approaches I made were deliberate:
- In a F4 at the behest of the QFI in the back who was specifically tasked to check the RW caravan chap - who spotted it and fired his red.
- In a VC10K whilst playing Bloggs for a fellow QFI, to show how easy it was to become lulled into complacency. I distracted him downwind with 'Bloggs questions' about circuit spacing and ground features, then didn't ask for 'Gear down, landing checks' at the normal point, just 'flap approach'. Of course the rest of the crew had been pre-briefed; normally the Air Engineer at least would have issued a firm warning and the Navigator would have queried the absence of the landing checklist request.
I'm not saying that I was in some way a superior pilot immune from inadvertent wheels-up approaches as I certainly wasn't! But training and aircraft are nowadays such that a casual human error should NOT lead to a gear up landing. Heck, even the Hunter had a warning to tell you if you had less than 1/3 throttle with the wheels up...... So to say that all pilots have either landed wheels up or are someday going is to insult the training excellence of the RAF - and is clearly bolleaux.
I only knew of a pilot who had actually made 2 wheels up approaches - both of which had been successfully thwarted by the switched on chap in the wheeled greenhouse at the end of the RW. He became a navigator.
I was told that it wasn't unknown in the old days ('back in the day' in yoof-speak) for a pilot who had managed to land gear up to be posted to fly the Beverley, Twin Pin or Chipmunk to avoid a second occurence....
