A2A Aerostar Emergency Landing
Posted: 01 Jan 2021, 06:46
We had to unfortunately belly land our airplane last night and wanted to share some more details with our community here.
Jake and I took the Aerostar up to do some practice IFR. Shortly after taking off the hydraulic pressure was rapidly dropping with the pump kicking in every 1-2 seconds to keep things pressurized. We suspected a hydraulic leak was the cause. In the Aerostar, there are no gear up locks. The only thing holding the gear up is hydraulic pressure, so if the system fails and you lose pressure, the gear comes down and locks. This is a great design and usually works as designed. So a hydraulic system failure in the Aerostar usually results in an uneventful flaps up landing.
However, as we were on approach to land and lowered the gear, nothing happened. As we discussed the situation, suddenly the nose gear down light locked. Then a few minutes later the right gear showed locked. Several cycles of the gear resulted in successfully raising, but not deploying all three. The only thing I could think of as being the cause at the time as some kind of blockage in the hydraulics preventing all three wheels from deploying properly.
The twist here was if our hydraulics were leaking and ultimately failed, we would be stuck with a nose and right gear deployed and landing with a left wing with fuel scraping on the pavement. Clearly not a desirable situation. However as time progressed the hydraulic pressure was more stable (losing pressure slowly) so I quickly called one of the best Aerostar mechanics in the biz and asked "Jim, is there any chance if I land gear up of any of the fuel lines or tanks rupturing?" and he said "Absolutely not. But you don't want to land with two wheels" which I fully agreed with. My main concern was not losing the opportunity to land safely with the gear up with 100 gallons of fuel on board.
So we decided to just tuck the gear up, contact the largest airport in the area (Bradley International KBDL) and belly it in. As I digest the events, combing over the choices we had, I'm grateful to have my son be there by my side as we worked through this (though the father wants his son as far away from danger as possible). The very first thing Jake said was "Dad, I'll handle the comms, you just fly the plane." Another was "Dad, you tell me when and I'll feather the engines, you don't worry about that." He was continuously taking the load off me. The mind works in strange ways during a crisis and it's critical that someone is always concentrating on properly flying the airplane. Jake made this happen and again which is why I believe twin engine airplanes should almost always be flown by two competent pilots. The twin is about redundancy and in this situation we can see how this worked having two pilots working together towards one goal.
As a result we landed it safely. It was probably the smoothest landing I ever made in this plane which I am grateful for as you can't hit the reset button this time to try again. The Aerostar felt like a rock and was surprisingly controllable as we were skidding, it almost felt like it was designed to belly land. There were no jerky movements however once we stopped seeing smoke come out from under the belly and thinking how that doesn't get along well with fuel, expedited our exit.
As more information comes in, I'll post it here.
Facebook post:
https://www.facebook.com/jacob.gentile. ... &ref=notif
Scott
- aerostar_belly.jpg (877.49 KiB) Viewed 48105 times
Jake and I took the Aerostar up to do some practice IFR. Shortly after taking off the hydraulic pressure was rapidly dropping with the pump kicking in every 1-2 seconds to keep things pressurized. We suspected a hydraulic leak was the cause. In the Aerostar, there are no gear up locks. The only thing holding the gear up is hydraulic pressure, so if the system fails and you lose pressure, the gear comes down and locks. This is a great design and usually works as designed. So a hydraulic system failure in the Aerostar usually results in an uneventful flaps up landing.
However, as we were on approach to land and lowered the gear, nothing happened. As we discussed the situation, suddenly the nose gear down light locked. Then a few minutes later the right gear showed locked. Several cycles of the gear resulted in successfully raising, but not deploying all three. The only thing I could think of as being the cause at the time as some kind of blockage in the hydraulics preventing all three wheels from deploying properly.
The twist here was if our hydraulics were leaking and ultimately failed, we would be stuck with a nose and right gear deployed and landing with a left wing with fuel scraping on the pavement. Clearly not a desirable situation. However as time progressed the hydraulic pressure was more stable (losing pressure slowly) so I quickly called one of the best Aerostar mechanics in the biz and asked "Jim, is there any chance if I land gear up of any of the fuel lines or tanks rupturing?" and he said "Absolutely not. But you don't want to land with two wheels" which I fully agreed with. My main concern was not losing the opportunity to land safely with the gear up with 100 gallons of fuel on board.
So we decided to just tuck the gear up, contact the largest airport in the area (Bradley International KBDL) and belly it in. As I digest the events, combing over the choices we had, I'm grateful to have my son be there by my side as we worked through this (though the father wants his son as far away from danger as possible). The very first thing Jake said was "Dad, I'll handle the comms, you just fly the plane." Another was "Dad, you tell me when and I'll feather the engines, you don't worry about that." He was continuously taking the load off me. The mind works in strange ways during a crisis and it's critical that someone is always concentrating on properly flying the airplane. Jake made this happen and again which is why I believe twin engine airplanes should almost always be flown by two competent pilots. The twin is about redundancy and in this situation we can see how this worked having two pilots working together towards one goal.
As a result we landed it safely. It was probably the smoothest landing I ever made in this plane which I am grateful for as you can't hit the reset button this time to try again. The Aerostar felt like a rock and was surprisingly controllable as we were skidding, it almost felt like it was designed to belly land. There were no jerky movements however once we stopped seeing smoke come out from under the belly and thinking how that doesn't get along well with fuel, expedited our exit.
As more information comes in, I'll post it here.
Facebook post:
https://www.facebook.com/jacob.gentile. ... &ref=notif
Scott
