Wow, I thought it was a neat product. Good for some not for others. Not full proof but obviously it can save some airplanes and maybe lives. Everybody has a head up their ass moment. My hats off to Wip for spending the time and money in an attempt to make amphib
Steve,
Maybe it is, but consider the scenario I mentioned. Unless there's something built in to allow an over-ride, the device will be telling the pilot that the wheels should be down. Presumably, there's a means to silence the thing, so that's what you do, or maybe as Farmboy noted, maybe the system requires you to silence it by selecting gear position.
But, in any case that's a lot of monkey motion and money to have a machine tell you you're over land, when you're just about to touch down on water.
Hopefully, there's more to it than I know. But, nevertheless, people are pretty regularly landing these things with the gear down in the water, often with disastrous consequences. And, all it takes to prevent that is to LOOK at the gear and THINK just a little prior to every landing.
Who is training these people who land gear down in the water? Perhaps unfortunately, there is no checkride required to operate an amphib....maybe there should be.
My amphib checkout was almost two hours of landings....land to water, then to land, then to land, then to water, etc, with about three minutes flight time between surfaces. All the while Tom Belleau was yelling in my ear, waving his hands wildly, armed with a rolled up newspaper, variable to VERY quietly offering instructions, ad nauseum. The point, of course was to see if he could get me distracted enough to forget the gear. I came out of that episode exhausted and kinda pissed off, but I got the message.
If you're flying an amphibian, you MUST be paranoid about the landing gear position.....if you're not, you're going to screw up.
And, as Pete noted, there are amphib floats out there that can actually fail between where the gear indicator sensor attaches and the wheel itself. If that happens, one gear can be down, but the system tells you all four are up. That may well be the beginning of a very bad day.
But, I just cannot see this or any other device as functionally replacing the pilot's eyes and brain.
MTV