Originally Posted by CliveL post #3112
To be frank, I can't imagine why anyone would even think of putting the gear down if ditching seemed inevitable
- Clive - your profile does not say much, but I guess you are looking at this from an engineering pov?
As others have said, it is more than possible that there was no 'planned' ditching. From a piloting pov, gear is sometimes lowered to try to control speed, and we do not yet know if this happened. It is useful to me to see if we can establish, from what we can see so far, the likelihood of the gear breaking free after impact rather than being extended AT impact. As with others, I believe the intial impact would have firmly 'trapped' the gear in the up position - whether inertia would have been sufficient to force it through the distorted doors and the uplocks is for physicists/engineers to say. I would hope that someone can see from the pics whether various jacks/angles etc indicate a simple 'free-fall' extension in the water or a planned one? Have we seen both main gear (and nose) yet?
Thank you for the information on gear stressing.