Originally Posted by
ShyTorque
JRB, I guessed as much. But please explain how, bearing that in mind, the flight crew were found to be at fault.
The argument could certainly be made that they were at fault for doing an inadequate pre-flight walk around. The squat switch is mounted right on the front of the main gear legs, and the sticks jammed into the rollers would have been clearly visible.
However, a flight crew member's specific responsibility during a pre flight walk around is not prescribed in a "regulatory" sense. The AFM provides a guidelines for things that the crew "should" look for... But "should" is not the same as "shall" when it comes to enforcement actions by authorities following an incident. I do know that current Gulfstream AFMs DO specify that the crew should look at the nutcracker switches during a preflight walk around - but I don't know if that was the case in 2002 when the accident occurred.
At the very least, I would like to think that a professional and conscientious pilot would want to look closely at the tires for obvious signs of wear, cuts, under-inflation etc... As well as obvious signs of leaking hydraulic fluid from the brakes, proper extension of the struts etc. To be fair though, on a Gulfstream, all of the these items are most easily seen from the rear of the main gear, while standing behind the trailing edge of the wing - so I can't say that the crew was negligent for not spotting the sticks in the nutcracker switches.
The flight crew's fault in the incident comes from their failure to follow the procedures clearly spelled out in the AFM for an actual or suspected failure of the weight-on-wheels system while in flight. In addition to the inability to retract the gear after takeoff, the crew would have seen other EICAS messages and warning lights that would have indicated the aircraft was still in ground mode.
The crew would ordinarily press a switch just before beginning the takeoff roll to arm automatic deployment of the ground spoilers in the case of an abort. Their very first AFM-mandated action in the case of a suspected WOW system failure after takeoff is to turn the ground spoiler arm switch OFF. They failed to do this. As I recall from reading the final report on the accident, post-crash interviews of the crew, and CVR transcripts showed that the crew did not refer to the QRH emergency procedures at all - they just reported to the tower that they had a gear retraction problem, and requested clearance to come back around for a landing - which they did. Of course, when they pulled the power levers back to idle to flare, the spoilers deployed, and the bottom dropped out. The aircraft was still about 50 feet in the air when the boards came up.
So, if the maintenance crew had not used an unauthorized ad hoc technique to bypass the WOW, system, the accident would not have happened. On the other hand, if the flight crew had followed the AFM procedures for a WOW system failure in flight, that too would have prevented the accident.