Surprise!
Surprise! You find your manual gear extension system doesn’t work the one time in your life you need it. Could this happen to you? I’m here to say it could. I’ve never experienced it in a real emergency situation but two times in my hours as a flight instructor. On one occasion when flying a Mooney 201 with the latest emergency extension system, we were unable to get the system to engage. The rigging of the mechanism was not perfect and it simply would not work. If this practice extension would have been for real, the only choice we would have had was where to land our Mooney without the wheels down. That would not have been a pleasant experience.
Recently on another occasion, I had a real scare with an electric gear on a Mooney Executive. As I’ve found in numerous occasions, one of the owners of this Executive had never manually extended the gear. During a training session, I decided to take him through the emergency gear extension steps as I would have with anyone. A much better option would have been to do this on jacks in the shop. We read the placard carefully and followed the instructions. First, we pulled the circuit breaker near the manual crank. We then put the gear down and pushed the emergency engage lever forward. Now to turn the handle only clockwise. While the gear was extending, we were monitoring the mechanical indicator on the floor. All of a sudden, the crank came to an absolute, solid, stop with the gear approximately half way down. I had never experienced this type of problem before and, yes, it frightened me. Something just had to have broken, or for some reason, bound so tightly it simply would go no farther. As my student had never extended the gear this way before, he thought it was normal. I assured him it was not and that we definitely had a problem. We thought back about what we may have done wrong and came up with no solution. As we were close to home, I was able to contact one of our mechanics by radio to review our situation. He had no obvious solution to our problem. We discussed the possibility of moving the handle slightly backwards but elected not to even consider that option. We have heard stories about what could happen with unwinding of the cable, eliminating the ability to extend the gear at all. As the crank simply would not go forward, our mechanic agreed with our decision to pull the emergency gear lever backwards disengaging the system and attempt to extend the gear electrically. The lever did pull backwards and seemed to disengage. As we were uncertain if the crank was disengaged, and knew it might spin when we extended the gear, we stowed the handle and kept out of its way. Now was the test of actually resetting the circuit breaker and hoping the gear would extend. We both held our breath, and after assuring the gear handle was down, I reset the circuit breaker. When the gear gave us that familiar kerplunk and the green light came on, we both breathed a sigh of relief. We checked the floor indicator for alignment and the green light was on. We also assured ourselves that the gear warning horn would not sound when we pulled back the throttle giving us another good indication of gear down. As one other measure of security, I pulled the gear circuit breaker after the gear was down. We then proceeded to land the airplane without incident.
Upon parking on the ramp, one of our mechanics looked at the gear down crank to determine the problem. We discovered that for some unusual reason, one of the screws holding the plastic cover located behind the manual crank had simply popped causing the handle to hit against it as we extended the gear. This sounds like a pretty simple problem, but I feel proves a point. We had to think through each move we made and we ultimately did everything right. We could have panicked and ended up with a much more serious problem.
We had the aircraft owner extend the gear manually while on jacks to assure he understood how it was supposed to work. I was pleased to have the problem be so simply corrected and always appreciate learning something new.
One lesson to be learned by our experience is that if you have not operated your gear manually, it is time to do so. I would also feel it is a good precaution to manually extend your gear once a year, whether you need it or not, just to assure its proper operation.
I have been involved the past few years with a seminar at the MAPA Homecoming telling of my experiences as a Mooney pilot, along with those of some of our customers. If by telling any of these stories, I’ve saved someone an unnecessary repair, an experience they didn’t need, an incident or even a life, the reward is obvious. I hope that many of you would like to be rewarded as well and have an experience you can share. We will relate any experiences through the MAPA Log and again at an improved and expanded seminar at MAPA Homecoming this fall.
Originally published MAPA Log
Revised October, 2009