Landing Gear Malfunction

All parts that compose an aircraft have an affect on how that aircraft will fly if something went wrong. Of course, some parts are considerably more important to the integrity of the aircraft, while others will make the flight uncomfortable. Landing gear failure has the potential to be one of the more severe ones depending if the gear is stuck down or stuck up. The primary indication of determining if your landing gear is up or down is by the landing gear indicator lights in the cockpit. Another possible indicator is when attempting to lower the gear, you hear an unusual sound.

    Landing gear failures are typically a mechanical issue, but can also be an electrical issue. Mechanically, the parts that lower and raise the gear could have gone bad or not secured properly. As well, the lubrication may have not been maintained properly or the materials corroded (Parat et al., 2019). Loss or inefficient application of hydraulic fluid can prevent the lubrication needed and cause corrosion across the landing gear (FAA, 2017). Electrically, the switch operating this feature could have been disconnected from its function either by wires breaking or shorting out.

    The biggest impact this has to an aircraft is landing. If the aircraft has taken off and their gear is stuck down, they would typically circle back for a landing. Now if the landing gear was stuck up nearing the end of the aircraft’s flight, the pilot will have to make a decision whether to land with gear up or continue flying to see if their diagnostics can find the problem and lower the gear in the end. One option an aircraft could do in effect to free the gear is by doing a high load factor maneuver. If this does not work, the pilot will have to land with the gear up. To mitigate the damage, the aircraft will have to come in at its slowest allowed speed to slide on the runway and stop in time before running off the runway. The plane's belly will suffer slight damage depending how hard it hit the ground and how high the speed was at landing. Usually this does not result in any fatal damage.

(A recent landing of an A-10 with no landing gear)

References

FAA. (2017). Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (Federal Aviation Administration): 

FAA-H-8083-25B. Federal Aviation Administration.

Parat, C., Li, Z. Y., & Zhao, J. S. (2019). Design and stiffness analysis of an 

overconstrained landing gear retraction mechanism with four side-stays. 

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G: Journal of 

Aerospace Engineering, 233(12), 4421–4435. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0954410018824509