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Profile: Ray Smith
What good is a gear warning horn if it sounds off too late to be of any use? Not much. The horn is activated only when the gear is up and the engine is running at very low power. (Otherwise the horn would be blaring away during normal flight.) Since Ray carried some power in the approach until he flared for landing—typical for this airplane—he got the warning too late to abort. |
he only time Ray Smith landed an airplane with its landing gear up, he managed to do only $2,000 worth of damage. He artfully put the Cessna 310 down so it skidded on its jackstands (heavy pads near the center of the plane that are used for jacking it up for maintenance). In the few seconds he had available between the time the gear warning horn sounded and the plane's belly mated with the Socorro, New Mexico paved runway, he cut off the fuel supply to the two engines and managed to get one propeller stopped in the horizontal position. The other one was turning slowly enough so that when it hit the pavement it wasn't much damaged.
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