Abort Procedure???

[aharon]

To all real life pilots, please take look at this video and I have question: why didnt the pilots immediately retract landing gear after aborted landing or is it required by procedures to leave landing gear deployed after aborted landing and take off??

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6H5IPXPhwI

[Tom/CalClassic]

Some sources say you are supposed to keep it down until you have established a stable climb.

[corum]

Airbus philosophy:

Go around, Flap = select go-around power, retract one notch of flap.

Positive rate, gear up = if your vertical speed indicator and radar altimeter indicate that your are climbing away, retract the gear.

In this case, your heart is thumping in your throat, and you are holding on for dear life..., as long as both engines are producing power, the gear retraction can wait until you have regained your composure...

In the meantime, ATC wants to know what your intentions are, ding-dong, the purser wants to know what's happening, "Captain are you ready for the after take-off checklist?", your ever helpful First Officer chimes into the mix.

If you stick to the checklist, you will now pick up that the gear is dangling...

Wait, are you flying slow enough to retract the gear? Yes/No.

Either way, there is a lot of paperwork that awaits...

Been there, done that. The T-shirt is still wet.

Blue skies.

M

[Jorge]

And then you also have your fuel to think about once you do the go-around.

Had to declare a fuel emergency at KEWR once after a go-around. VFR conditions, minimal contingency fuel from dispatch, rerouting from almost the time we left KCLE, and then some Colgan Q400 in front of us takes forever to get off 4R. Tower says, "Jetlink so-and-so, go around," and up we go again.

After our checklists and after we're in the conga-line to come back we start running numbers and there's no way we're going to be on the ground in an hour, much less 45 minutes. Fuel says we had an hour of fuel when we arrived and got the go-around, but the problem was that everyone had about the same amount of fuel since it was a nice day. Some folks went to JFK, some to LGA, while others went to Philly.

Ten minutes later declared "bingo fuel" and "min fuel" another ten minutes after that (along with the emergency). Got direct to the fix at 5-mile final and did a high speed visual approach, changed from flaps 45 approach to a flaps 22, added 5 knots to all the speeds as a rough number for the V-speeds, ran checklists, and in we went. Thankfully my F/O was "johnny on the spot" that day.

Got to the gate at KEWR with boxed, red numbers on the fuel readout.

Fun times.

Jorge

[aharon]

Thanks all for kind answers. I got official answer from real like 787 pilot as in his own words:

The short answer is… that looked like a nuts show and flying the jet comes first….

The long answer is….
The normal procedure for a go around is to retract the gear once a climb is established. The only exception would be in the case of an wind shear warning from the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) which you would wait until the warning cleared (at least at my airline). Judging by the way the plane was getting tossed around it is a possibility that’s the case. The other more likely case was after the balked landing and what appeared to be a pretty hard bounce there was a startle factor and the crews first priority was to just get the jet away from the ground and the procedure was delayed a bit.

Normal callouts on a 787 (my company) would be…
Going Around
Flaps 20
Check Thrust…
Positive Rate
Gear up
check missed approach altitude.

[mrcapitalism]

There are a lot of differences between aircraft and airlines. But a lot of similarities. Your best source for the answer to this question is a SpeedBird Dreamliner pilot. The rest of us can only make educated guesses... although they can be fairly educated.

Early in my career I incorrectly speculated on the cause of an accident (Colgan Air). What actually happened was something I did not expect. As a result, I don't like to speculate on causes, based on limited information. I consider a 20 second video taken from the ground to be a very limited eyewitness account. There's no way I can tell you for sure what happened on that flight deck, which resulted in the outcome you saw (extended gear go-around).

So because I'm unwilling you tell you why something happened (because I don't know), what I can offer instead is to discuss factors which may result in the video you've posted.

In every retracting gear aircraft I'm familiar with, the landing gear is retracted as soon as it's safe to do so. For every airliner I know, that's upon verifying that a positive rate of climb has been established. For normal takeoff, and go around. corum says VSI and radio altitude. I've been taught baro altitude and VSI instead, but it's a minor difference... pretty much the same procedure.

So that comes to your question, why did they not retract the gear? I don't know their books, I don't have the interview of the pilot, can't read the CVR transcript, or view an animation of the FDR. I wasn't sitting in the cockpit, so I can't say for sure. But here are some thoughts.

1. For all airlines I know (not BAW), the crew are instructed not to raise the landing gear when performing the windshear escape maneuver. Presumably, this is to allow them to be completely focused on aircraft control and avoiding collision with the surface. No gear retraction, no flap retraction.
1a. The windshear escape maneuver *can be* required of the crew after the aircraft automatically detects certain conditions of windshear ("decreasing performance") *If* there was announced an automated windshear warning, the crew *might* have been required to perform the escape maneuver, which *may* mandate leaving the landing gear extended.
1b. There *should* be an option in their procedures for the Captain to command the escape maneuver, even in the absence of an automated alert.
1c. The weather conditions depicted in your 2 minute video *would be* appropriate for those in which windshear could be encountered. And this is supported by the control difficulties the aircraft recovered from.
1d. An aside (because I presume you're not a pilot). You perhaps think that the landing was 'aborted' after the wheels touched the surface. This is not the only case. It's not at all surprising to have the aircraft touch down even after the go around has been initiated. They *could have* either decided, or received the alert, while still descending to the runway, and it just so happened that they contacted the surface during the execution of the go around or escape.
2. The crew may have been task saturated, or distracted, which resulted in the go around with landing gear extended.
3. The crew could have suspected damage to the landing gear, and in the interest of safety they *could* have decided to leave it extended. At first viewing I thought they bounced onto the nose gear, but they didn't. It was a very sporty landing anyways!
3a. They could have received an automated warning of a landing gear fault, which prompted them to leave the landing gear extended.
4. They could have attempted to retract the landing gear (perhaps in combination with 3a) and the landing gear failed to retract, perhaps because of the landing on the nose wheel and subsequent bounce (EDIT: The nose wheel didn't touch).
5. Something else I haven't thought of, or some other procedure I don't know about.

[aharon]

Thanks all for great explanations

Regards,

Aharon