"steve" wrote in message
. ..
They just sent me an email stating that a student pilot from the flight
center they share it with, landed it with the gear up. How embarrassing,
especially since the plane has an automatic gear down deployment once it
drops below 100mph and the manifold and rpm resemble a landing
configuration. He/she must have shut it off. It has a loud alarm that
sounds off in that situation, so I don't know what might have happened..

Depending on what else he was doing with the airplane that flight, it might
not be surprising for the automatic deployment to be disabled temporarily
(I'm assuming that since you're familiar with the airplane, you know whether
it's been permanently disabled, and that it hasn't been). It's common to
disable the auto deployment when practicing power-on stalls, for example (so
the gear doesn't drop while you get the airplane slowed down and otherwise
configured for the stall).

As for the warning horn, most retractable gear airplanes are equipped with
gear warning horns, and pilots frequently manage to ignore them. It seems
to me that in many gear-up landings, they are preceded by some sort of
distraction. Something odd about the traffic pattern entry, or having to
extend the pattern, or something along those lines. Of course, when a
distraction happens, the pilot may well find himself having to focus even
more, and this focus can result in not being aware of a warning horn.
Ironic, since that's just when the horn is most needed.

Anyway, I'd say that history has shown us that the airplane features you
mention (auto deply and warning horn) are not 100% effective in preventing
gear-up landings. Too often, the very factors that led to the gear-up
landing in the first place are related to why those features don't wind up
being useful.

Pete