Screaming from the rooftops into the void, YES.
I’m going to take this one from the instructor’s viewpoint, so that as a student or pilot undergoing transition training, you can understand why your CFI might feel strongly about this scenario.
Instructors: Once you’ve been teaching long enough, you’re bound to have students who purchase airplanes. If you’re a person helping give ethical purchasing advice, and you’re helping identify the pilot’s mission, it’s only a matter of time before someone buys a something-something with retractable gear. Now usually this goes pretty well as you’ll get to hopefully give them their initial training in the make and model, and you can help instill good habits.
After you have trained them and released them into the wild you’ll see them much less, but they may occasionally come back to you for a flight review or some additional training. That’s a prime scenario for them to come at you with the statement, not the question (and that’s an important distinction), “I don’t retract my gear when I am in the pattern,” right as they are rolling onto the runway for takeoff. The perfect time to have any logical discussion …
So what do you do? Do capitulate? It’s their airplane, after all. Or do you demand that they retract the gear when they fly with you because that’s how you want them to do it and you’re the instructor and know best? Now by the time you have even considered any option you’re already hurling down the runway about to launch into the wild blue yonder. Time for discussion is limited at this point.
Congratulations, you have just unearthed a genuine opportunity to exercise the privileges of your flight instructor certificate that combines technical operation with human factors. This is a prime teachable moment for you as an instructor and a great learning opportunity for your student. At this point, while you’re still on the runway and time and distance allow, do the right thing—reach up and pull the power to idle (gently) and tell them they just lost their engine. Now, as a piece of advice, don’t do that if you haven’t done appropriate preflight planning, and you don’t know both the takeoff, landing, and “accelerate-stop” distances so you don’t turn an uninformed statement into an accident, because by the time the thought process clicks through you’re bound to be at about rotation speed.
After you’re safely off the runway, taxi to an area on the ramp where you can shut down out of the way—you’re going to need some time to have a discussion.
The Big Landing Gear Question
As a point of advice here, it’s easy to feel a couple of ways about this. First, the student bamboozled you with this as you were crossing the hold short line, and there’s probably some stress associated, so take a couple of deep breaths and remember this. “Because I said so,” or soapboxing a general “we don’t do it this way,” aren’t teaching and won’t do anything but make the student maybe surrender to you this one time but not learn anything that affects a positive behavioral change. They will go right back to the bad habit and probably avoid you a little more in the future.
Always start with a question. “Why don’t you retract the gear in the pattern, Timmy?” The student is then going to give you one of two very straightforward answers—it will either be, “The gear motor is expensive to repair or replace so I’m saving money,” or “So I don’t forget to put the wheels down.” Either answer is bad, but one is harder to fix than the other.
Which one is the harder to fix? Take a second and think about it. OK, time’s up. If you guessed the first one you’re right. Aircraft ownership is complex and can be expensive, and you never know anyone’s actual financial situation, but if the money they are trying to save is on gear motor repairs they need to have a serious conversation if they can actually afford to own that airplane. The second is easier because you can dive right into the human factors without worrying about offending someone’s wallet factor.
The strategy I always use when teaching through the wallet factor is pretty straightforward. The depreciation hit your airplane will take from a gear-up landing—even with a quality repair—far outweighs the cost of a couple of gear motor overhauls or replacements. Most of the time it works well enough to push them toward the right page. They sometimes will choose to make the statement here, “Well, I fly a lot and know my airplane really well, and I won’t forget to put the gear out.” Hazardous attitudes discussion, anyone?
You’ll always follow it up with knockout punch of human factors, and if it was the other scenario, this would be your starting point. If you’re worried about forgetting to put the gear down, so you leave them down, it’s only a matter of time before you land with the gear up. This is a habit you want to break quickly: Forgoing an operation in the guise of safety is never actually safe. You need to dive into human performance and habits to lock this down. You want to ask the question, “Why do you think you’ll forget to put the gear down?” Many times the student is worried about their lack of experience, or they read something online, or someone they know told them just to do it that way. The problem in this instance is more than just muscle memory; how do you ever actually use your preflight planning practically if you’re planning for takeoff performance with gear up, but yours is down? I haven’t seen many light airplanes that have a chart for that. You’ll want to reassure your student that performance matters in this instance, both aircraft and human.
When you plan your flight you’re planning it under certain conditions setting the expectations of performance that you use to make critical in-flight decisions—by leaving the gear out you normalize a deviant behavior that can lead to an unfortunate outcome on a future flight. Your student is normalizing flying a much slower and worse-performing airplane; when they hit a complicated airspace someday and aren’t used to climbing out with 500 extra feet per minute (fpm) in the climb it gets easy to clip an airspace you don’t intend—a self-induced panic point based on bad technique.
The final portion is the landing approach. Let the pilot know this: “If you always practice with the gear out, when you’ve had a long day, had to divert, have a passenger yappin’ away—really any nonstandard situation you haven’t practiced for—the scene is set to forget to put the gear down and have the smoothest landing you have ever had. It’s a lot harder to taxi into the ramp after though, and all the other pilots won’t think your airplane looks as cool anymore.”
Discipline of operation is critical in aviation; when the stress level rises pilots are going to perform to the standards that they hold themselves to as a pilot. Don’t get distracted by things that don’t matter when it comes to maintaining that discipline. Like the late, great Bob Hoover is purported to have said, “Fly by the numbers; don’t add 5 knots for your wife.”
I certainly understand it, both ways. But I would base it on the aircraft owner. Flying with a long time retract kinda guy or gal, I too would leave it down and try relying on good memory habits. Many, many years ago, while checking out in an Aero Club T-34 in the USAF, we did extend the gear in the pattern including letting it shut off the gear warning horn. But in the many trips around the pattern, he, my Maj. CFI always had me every time as I turned final say out loud, “Final, final Gear Check”, which I would then repeat as I observed the gear lights. Many years later, regardless of type aircraft, I still out of habit do it. I feel like it is the best gear reinforcement I’ve ever been taught. And when flying a Lake LA20, I would always say turning final, “Landing on land, gear extended…..Or Landing on water, gear retracted” and at that point look to insure.
Good article and good advice Doug. Aircraft performance is based on factory certified procedure which when deviated from renders the pilot a test pilot. I agree with you and Bob Hoover.
In my airplane if I drag it around with the gear down, I’ll cook my cylinders. Don’t ask me how I know this.
You’re doing something wrong, there’s times you want the gear down. If you can’t control the temps, go LOP, that will work, or reset your fuel flow. The rest of us don’t have that problem
1956 G35 Bonanza with a pressure carburetor Larry. I have owned it for 30+ years and built the last 2 engines myself. I see you’ve drunk the LOP cool aid… lol!!!
If I’m giving you instruction, you need to show me all the steps of operation, including raising the gear. Failure to raise the gear – even in the pattern – is a fail and will not earn you a Flight Review or any type of favorable sign-off from me. If an aircraft owner won’t comply, then I won’t instruct them. Here endeth the lesson.
It’s pretty straightforward to me. Student, what are you doing in the pattern? You’re training. What are you training to do? If you’re flying for a purpose other than training do you fly the pattern with the gear down if you have to go around? Do you fly a missed approach with the gear down? No. So why would you train that way?
I always found the idea of leaving the gear down in the pattern silly. The purpose if complex training is to develop habits and intentionally skipping memory items like the proper gear position should render a pilots mental checklist incomplete and a red light flashing. I mentally (two pilots = verbally) announce and verify my intended landing surface (land/ water) and gear position, even in fixed gear aircraft.
Fun story from the past, I was along on several flights with the new owner of nearly new Piper Meridian. On one of the first flights, we departed the airport and upon reaching 3500 feet my buddy looks over and shrugs: “Flies like a pig today”.
I asked him where the rubber is and what kind of magically invisible checklist he was using?
“Sh….” came from the left seat with a chuckle. We raised the gear and the plane accelerated much better. I asked him to use the checklist every step of the way, lest this airplane also lands like a pig, with the gear up. His previous flying was all fixed gear and the Meridian served him as a personal business vehicle for trips within Europe.
The question is not if one gets task saturated enough to forget the gear – but when. We never rise to the occasion and do heroic deeds in any situation that requires full focus. We really just fall back to the best level of training we’ve had. If that training was in a fixed gear plane and the gear was of no concern, there are old habits to break and new ones to learn.
To me it doesn’t matter if someone finds the gear callouts in a Cessna 150 funny or strange. Its a habit. Its my habit. End of story.
Gear goes up immediately upon lift off. On landing, gear goes down on final. No one talks, or, does anything while I’m anywhere near prepping for a landing, or, departure. All passengers are forewarned ahead of time and if violated a quick reminder “shut up” from me solves the issue. Landings and takeoffs are sterile always and forever.
Unless there is some nuance to that, that isn’t a particularly good practice either. The nuance does matter (as well as clearly explaining that nuance to a student).
In some aircraft, raising the gear produces a lot more drag during the gear-up cycle than just leaving it down. So in the case of a short-field takeoff with true obstacles at the end of the runway, if you are flying such an aircraft, leaving the gear down until clear of the obstacles would be better.
Likewise, if you’re taking off from a 10,000′ runway (or otherwise lengthy runway), I might actually intentionally leave it down until I’m at a point where I can’t land back on the runway.
I would also not raise the gear “immediately upon lift off” if I’m doing a soft-field takeoff. I would at least wait until I’m out of ground effect and in a stabilized climb before raising the gear.
Gear goes down on downwind — abeam the numbers.
Goes down on final only during an IFR straight in
GUMPS on downwind/IAF; on base/IF; and final/FAF
“I don’t retract my gear when I am in the pattern,” right as they are rolling onto the runway for takeoff.
In this scenario, I would say we have already failed as a CFI if the discussion of when to raise the gear comes up that late in the training session. That should have been discussed on the ground, prior to even walking to the aircraft.
As for whether to raise the gear or not when staying in the pattern, I say it depends on what specifically the goal of the flight is, and what sort of experience the pilot has. If it’s for a flight review or similar proficiency/evaluation purpose, yes, the gear goes up and the gear goes down each time around. But if it’s just to practice landings, as long as the gear is checked for being down each time around, I don’t see any particular fault with not raising the gear. Put another way, do we expect pilots to pull the prop back on the downwind each time around the pattern with a constant speed prop?
In general, I have found that unless a pilot’s actions or behaviors are dangerous, inconsistent (without reason), or contribute to negative training, it is better to let them do what they are used to and either suggest at an appropriate time to try something else or include it in the debrief.
In the case of a pilot not raising the gear in the pattern when their intent is to only practice takeoffs and landings, if they were to not check that the gear is down, that is clearly asking to land gear-up some day.
In other words, this is a long-winded way of saying “it depends”. I find that blanket statements of “always do X” or “never to Y” are rarely appropriate (yes, there are some cases where such statements are appropriate, but I have found that to be the exception rather than the rule).
The “rightest” answer is, as usual, “it depends”. A couple of years ago at my home field during a Twin Comanche checkout, this rule *caused* a gear up landing and a $90k repair bill. Multiple trips around the pattern with multiple gear cycles combined with a very hot day to overheat the gear motors. Yes, Swiss Cheese played a factor but w/o the repetitive cycling, this wouldn’t have happened. The majority of my flight time has been in RG aircraft. Some, like my old Mooneys (w/manual gear), climb poorly with the gear down and the only thing to overheat from cycling is me. Others, like my present ship, hardly notice the difference at climbout speeds.
Plus, I question the value of pattern work in complex aircraft. If the point is to develop a mental muscle memory, it’s a fail, being totally disruptive to the flow of normal ops. Half the work of a good approach and landing for fast A/C is getting it slowed down and configured to enter the pattern on speed, position, and altitude. As a “3 takeoffs & landings in 90 days”, closed circuits are a double fail. Why practice what you’re never going to do at most other times?
“Pattern work” is not even in the ACS for any rating. Neither are touch and go landings. For complex aircraft, I have the trainee bounce between two airports just far enough apart to enter cruise for a few minutes. We arrive, land, taxi-back and go again. Emergency procedures are incorporated into that routine. Go-arounds will include configuring the airplane for extended climb, even if our intent is to stay in the pattern.
The only exception I make is for practicing the power off 180 task for the commercial. For that task, I assume the role of co-pilot and definitely confirm the handle and lights verbally.
Anyway, that’s how I do it.
That’s a great writeup!! I retract the gear on my 177RG as soon as I have a positive rate. And put it down mid field downwind or 2 mile final. Just like the big boys. I put a label “GEAR” by 80 on the airspeed indicator (old school cockpit) and it is a nice reminder as I watch airspeed on approach carefully. My approach landing checklist is Red, Blue, Green. (mix, prop, gear). Not much else matters on my plane.
Though I haven’t instructed in close to fifty years, two things came to mind and you hit them pretty well. First, what if an engine quits (or THE engine) quits on takeoff? There’s going to be a delayed reaction to the pilot’s reaction to retract the gear or not, depending on the situation.
Second thing is establishing habits. I found myself doing a ‘mini’ GUMP check for 37 years, right through my retirement flight on the 757!