Originally Posted By: 440Magnum
Originally Posted By: Astro14
His actions and description make zero sense..."coming down too fast"...so..."he raised the landing gear"...
[censored]???
He planned to do a go-around, and standard procedure is to suck the gear back up and gain speed. But in some aircraft, retracting the gear causes a brief increase in drag when all the doors open before the gear come up. He waited just a little to late to pull the gear and start climbing... It was a sequence of mistakes, no doubt, but once he'd committed to a go-around, trying to change to a belly landing midway through it would have probably killed him when he shot off the end of the runway.
Beautiful old Aerostar, too. Always loved those, and the mid-wing layout certainly made it possible for him to survive that one.
His actions still make no sense. Sucking the gear back up might be the first part of a go-around in this airplane (but it is not part of the go-around in the roughly 30 airplanes that I've flown...), but there comes a point in any approach in which it is TOO LATE to retract the gear.
At that point, you simply have to do a touch and go, or a full stop landing. Poor judgement in failing to recognize that point in the approach.
If he was "too fast" to do the full stop, and he was "coming down too fast", then adding full power while maintaining AOA/airspeed would have arrested his rate of descent far faster than raising the gear, which, like many airplanes, causes a drag increase, a trim change, and then a drag decrease.
Looks to me like he simply stopped flying it while he was raising the gear. The airplane continued to sink, and the pitch was unchanged, then it pitched slightly down (that trim change, perhaps) and settled onto the runway.
By deciding too late to abort the approach, and then fumbling through the very basics of flying, (power, pitch, trim) he wrecked his own airplane. He wrecked a perfectly good airplane.