Ouch... That's painful to look at 

Man, especially a B-1B.  You have to be someone special to get into the cockpit of one of those, and then... that.  Over in a heartbeat.

GUMP check times three EVERY TIME!!! works if your flying a cessna 172 RG or a 747-400 (minus the props)

downwind abeam the numbers - "Gas Undercarriage Mixture Prop"

base - "Gas Undercarriage Mixture Prop"

Final - "Gas Undercarriage Mixture Prop"

When i fly any General Aviation Retract i make a little placard that says "GEAR" and i stick it on the panel right above the airspeed indicator.

On an aircraft like the B1 i would certainly think it had TAWS / GPWS bitching at them all the way down "Too low gear!"   "Too low gear!"   "Terrain terrain"... the only thing i can think of is that MAYBE it was inoperative and didnt give them the usual warnings?? but still.

Quote:



When I stared gliding the one thing I wanted was to get those hours and quals together so I could get into something "plastic". Our club piece of "plastic" was an Astir, also known as the plastic pig. Looking back a horrible glider, but she had retractable gear and was sleek looking even if she did fly like a house brick. I was introduced to WUF. Water, undercarriage and flaps. This is now many years ago, but spent the day going up, down and around in a K13. The weather was not so great for gliding that day, but it was flying. After lunch, the weather improved, so I got into the Astir. I was scratching away, just holding my own, but my time was up. Now when you land a glider one of the first things that you notice after touch down and the speed has bled away, one wing gracefully starts to drop and you sit on the ground at 20 degrees. If however, you forget to lower the gear of the Astir, it has a very fat underside and sits perfectly level advertising to the entire club that you have just fucked up. Fortunately no damage occurred other than to my wallet that night in the bar. Our QFI asked if it was at all likely that I would be making the same mistake again and we both felt that a lesson had been learnt and that a repeat performance was not on the cards. Had I done some damage I am sure that I would have spent the WHOLE summer driving the winch.

Matt

That would be one terrible statement of charges. I wonder if their CO smoked them for a while.

How fast can you say "Front, Back, Go!"....?

beaky wrote on Dec 18^th, 2006 at 11:22am:

Not sure I would be so forgiving. In fact I would throw the book at him. I doubt very much that the USAF has operated any fixed gear types since this chap started basic training so he can't use that as an excuse. There was obviously something very wrong with their operating procedures. I don't care how many warning devices are fitted to the aircraft there is no substitute for correct procedures.

Brett_Henderson wrote on Dec 18^th, 2006 at 12:56pm:

The the thing about that is, as I'm sure you know, making such an unfathomably huge error might be indicative of a bigger problem.  Plus, when you cause tens of millions of dollars of damage, someone needs to go down.