A FEMALE pilot has been praised for averting disaster after her four passengers walked away unscathed from a crash landing at Cairns Airport yesterday.
Perhaps she was praised but whoever endorsed her needs a kick up the ar*e if the cause of the accident was as it appears to be from the paper's report.
It appears that one leg failed to lock in the down position. C210N's do not have uplocks and are held there by hydraulic pressure alone.
Each main leg does have a spring loaded downlock which does 2 jobs. It secures the gear in the down position and activates a micro switch which switches the gear pump motor off and the green gear safe light on.
It is not an exceptionally rare event for these spring loaded downlocks to refuse to spring out as far as they should and it is usually the starboard one that hangs up from gunk out of the oil breather pipe.
Most 210 pilots have it drummed into them to pull the circuit breaker if the gear motor runs on because they start to make smoke after a couple of minutes and shortly after fail completely.
If after a couple of gear cycles the leg still refuses to lock a normal landing can still be made. As mentioned above hydraulic pressure holds the gear up and it is quite capable of holding the gear down......only not for long or the motor will burn out.
Fly a normal approach with the gear pump circuit breaker off and just before touchdown reactivate the pump. Works a treat. Once the weight of the plane is on the gear it can't go anywhere. Pull the circuit breaker if you wish but the squat switch will switch the pump off anyway.
Although it is counter intuitive, 210's that really can't get their gear down should land on bitumen. Harsh experience (data Jabba) has proved that the bitumen does far less damage. Also don't let the firies put down foam. The plane just slides on forever and stops after the end of the foam. Cairns has an unused strip 12- 30. They should have used that one.