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Comment by kitteh | Hacker News Reader

Retract on any aircraft is going to drive up insurance.

The number of gear up landings on Mooneys surprisingly high. As for cirruses, they are rather unforgiving, and I think people get some confidence with the parachute--every time I hear about an accident, I feel I'm reading about another Cirrus.

Another reason there are so many Cirrus accidents is that in an effort to improve its safety record, Cirrus began advising its pilots to use the parachute whenever in doubt. I don't mean this as a knock in the slightest -- the statistics are very convincing that this is saving lives[1]. But a funny side effect is that you see a bunch of accidents where someone parachutes a Cirrus into a field that any other airplane would have just landed in.

[1] https://airfactsjournal.com/2016/08/whats-right-cirrus-pilot...

Yeah, I recently went through Cirrus training, I'm quite current for a GA pilot (150 hours a year, commercial and instrument ratings) and personally feel it's a lot of plane. Most of the avionics and checklists, while great if you are used to it could easily task saturate you. It could probably also lure you into thinking it's a Tesla and not an airplane.

A Cirrus is an easy plane to get behind in. Jumping from a C152 that putters along at 90kts leaves you with a lot of time to work the checklists. When I started flying the high performance aircraft it was really easy to miss things because everything was faster. The cirrus was fun but you have to pay attention.

Yeah, this is not to be underestimated

There was a huge difference in trying (and often failing) to stay ahead of the plane even moving from a 172 to a 182.

I've heard once you get down nearing stall speed, the Cirrus gets pretty difficult to control?

My uncle did that in his Mooney, in fact, not terribly many years ago. He was super embarrassed, but it is, as you say, pretty common. The gear-up landing was a non-event from a safety POV, but was essentially financially terminal for the plane -- prop hit the ground, etc.

As you can buy a one ray lidar sensor for about a $100 for drones, with about 50m of range, I wonder why it can't be used in full scale airplanes? It could be used to point down at the ground, and when the lidar is confident of the range and if the gear is up, then trigger an alarm.

I get that there's more things involved for a practical implementation (weight, reliability, added complexity) but still... What am I missing?

Task saturation. It's windy, turbulent, your wife is uncomfortable and giving you looks. Someone cuts you off as you are landing, you go around. The field is busy and as you come back around for landing you're focusing about being unable to get your radio calls in. You land to the sounds of grating metal... Just one of 1000 scenarios.

As mentioned there are alarms already, but you can drown it out if sufficiently overloaded. Its best to recognize overload, take a deep breath and go back when calm.

There are similar (but more basic) systems built into some retractable gear aircraft. They generally provide an audible alert if the plane appears about to land but the gear is still up.

Pilots still land gear up, even with the alarm sounding. There is (or at least was) even a public (YouTube) video of this happening from a passenger filming.

Landing a plane is not difficult (source: I’m a pilot) but there’s a lot going on. This is clearly a UI/UX issue but innovation is relatively slow in the certified market.

Just search for "gear up landing"; this situation is...plentiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hMn7ZweF6s

And yeah, before anyone says "but the beeping!" - yup, people are fallible. I've managed to scratch a car in a similar but far cheaper setting: start up...set navigation...go into reverse...think about the traffic announcement...think about garage keys...hear parking sensors beeping...beeping intensifies...CRUNCH...facepalm, dammit I was supposed to brake! In my case, this was a low-speed, low-energy collision, so just a tiny scratch on plastic, but I can definitely see how a minor distraction can turn into a major accident.

The anecdote I've heard is that the gear up / low throttle alarm is usually the component to break and people fail to replace it, which leads to gear ups.

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