Landing gear door operation

"Lynn Coffelt" wrote:

very early T-38's used hydraulic powered "ailerons" on the main landing gear
doors to help retract the main gear in flight. The wing was so thin that
there wasn't much room for conventional retraction mechanism. Seemed to work
OK, but later models found room for conventional mechanism. Did it use a
shrink scheme to retract the oleo strut while the gear retracted??? Been a
while!

Old Chief Lynn

Must have been very early. The airplane came into the inventory in '62
and I flew it in early '65 at Williams AFB. There were no "ailerons"
or movable parts on the MLG doors at that time. There was a
conventional compression strut and a 45 degree "drag link" that pushed
and pulled for extension/retraction hydraulically. The wing had no
bulges, such as on the F-4, to assist in housing the gear when
retracted. The gear strut fit in the wing thickness and the wheel/tire
assembly retracted into the underside of the fuselage.

We had an incident in my pilot training class in which one of the
German student (fully one-third of each UPT class at Willy was
German's enroute to the F-104 across town at Luke), apparently trying
some BFM tactics he had heard about, extended the gear at high speed
and high G load in a turn. The resultant over-stress of the assembly
sheared both MLG drag links leaving both gear unsupported and
braced--swinging freely back and forth in the bay.

A chase aircraft (the wing DO) visually inspected the damage and the
student was directed to make a controlled ejection over the base. We
had a procedure, flying off a CHD TACAN radial a set distance at 10k
MSL then ejecting. Both the student and the airplane landed within the
field boundary.

They could never prove the student error (actually student pilots
cannot make "pilot error" judgements) and he graduated on time and
went on to a Luftwaffe career flying the 104.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
***"When Thunder Rolled:
*** An F-105 Pilot Over N. Vietnam"
*** from Smithsonian Books
ISBN: 1588341038