Belly landing

A belly landing, pancake landing or gear-up landing occurs when an aircraft lands without its landing gear fully extended and uses its underside, or belly, as its primary landing device. Normally the term gear-up landing refers to incidents in which the pilot forgets to extend the landing gear, while belly landing refers to incidents where a mechanical malfunction prevents the pilot from extending the landing gear.

During a belly landing, there is normally extensive damage to the airplane. Belly landings carry the risk that the aircraft may flip over, disintegrate, or catch fire if it lands too fast or too hard. Extreme precision is needed to ensure that the plane lands as straight and level as possible while maintaining enough airspeed to maintain control. Strong crosswinds, low visibility, damage to the airplane, or unresponsive instruments or controls greatly increase the danger of performing a belly landing. Still, belly landings are one of the most common types of aircraft accidents, and are normally not fatal if executed carefully.

The most common cause of gear-up landings is the pilot simply forgetting to extend the landing gear before touchdown. On any retractable gear aircraft, lowering the landing gear is part of the pilot's landing checklist, which also includes items such as setting the flaps, propeller and mixture controls for landing. Pilots who ritually perform such checklists before landing are less likely to land gear-up. However, some pilots neglect these checklists and perform the tasks by memory, increasing the chances of forgetting to lower the landing gear. Even studious pilots are at risk, for they may be distracted and forget to perform the checklist or be interrupted in the middle of it by other duties such as collision avoidance or another emergency. In the picture shown above, the B-17 Dutchess' Daughter had landed normally, when the copilot inadvertently flipped the landing gear switch to retract. The gear collapsed near the end of the landing roll. The common nature of gear-up landings caused by pilot error has led to an adage within the aviation community: "There are two types of pilots: Those that have landed gear up, and those that will."

All aircraft with retractable landing gear are required to have a way to indicate the status of the landing gear, which is normally a set of lights that change colors from red to amber to green depending on whether the gear are up, in transit, or down. However, a distracted pilot may forget to look at these lights. This has led to aircraft designers building extra safety systems in the aircraft to reduce the possibility of human error. In small aircraft this most commonly takes the form of a warning light and horn which operate when any of the landing gear is not locked down and any of the engine throttles are retarded below a cruise power setting. However, the horn has been useless in situations when the pilot was unfamiliar with the aircraft and did not know what the horn sounding was meant to indicate. Pilots have sometimes confused the landing gear warning horn with the stall warning horn. In other cases, pilots cannot hear the horn on older aircraft due to wearing a modern noise-canceling headset.

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