Has a plane ever landed without landing gear?

Passenger lands plane without landing gear after pilot suffers medical emergency. A pilot of a small plane suffered a medical emergency in the air, prompting a passenger to take over controls and make a crash landing with no landing gear at Martha's Vineyard Airport, authorities said.



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Discussion: In some cases pilots may need to reject a landing due to rapidly deteriorating weather conditions which reduce the visibility required for a safe landing.

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The most common cause of gear-up landings is the pilot simply forgetting to extend the landing gear before touchdown. On any retractable gear aircraft, lowering the landing gear is part of the pilot's landing checklist, which also includes items such as setting the flaps, propeller and mixture controls for landing.

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Transferring too much weight onto the nosewheel causes a situation called wheelbarrowing, which can lead to a loss of directional control, prop strike, or nose gear collapse. On top of those problems, with little to no weight on your main landing gear, you have little braking action.

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The term hard landing usually implies that the pilot still has total or partial control over the aircraft, as opposed to an uncontrolled descent into terrain (a crash). Hard landings can vary in their consequences, from mild passenger discomfort to vehicle damage, structural failure, injuries, and/or loss of life.

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A pilot managed to land his plane safely after a section of his wing fell off during an aerobatic flight. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said the right aileron - the trailing edge of a wing which controls movement - came off when the pilot performed a roll.

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Do pilots always land planes manually? Yes. Virtually every single airline pilot manually lands every single flight.

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While no passenger or non-experienced pilot has ever successfully landed a commercial plane, occasionally someone without experience manages to land a smaller plane.

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The disappearance of the Boeing 777 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board led to a search effort stretching from the Indian Ocean west of Australia to Central Asia. The perplexing nature of the loss of flight 370 is such that it has become one of history's most famous missing aircraft.

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Among 99 known cases of wheel-well stowaways from 1947 through June 6, 2013, there were 76 fatalities and 23 survivors. It is possible there are additional undocumented cases of successful surviving wheel-well stowaways escaping the aircraft undetected possibly with outside assistance.

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Question: Right after takeoff, it often seems that the pilot slows down and the plane drops somewhat. Why is that? I have noticed that it is pretty consistent. Answer: The sensation of slowing down is really one of slowing the rate of acceleration; this is due to reducing the thrust after takeoff to the climb setting.

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A takeoff may be rejected for a variety of reasons, including engine failure, activation of the takeoff warning horn, direction from air traffic control (ATC), blown tires, or system warnings.

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While turbulence can feel scary, airplanes are designed to withstand massive amounts of it. A plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket, wrote pilot Patrick Smith on his site, AskThePilot.com.

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