Cessna gear-up at MMU today (Morristown NJ)

On Dec 11, 6:19 pm, "~^ beancounter ~^" wrote:
yea, i would think the pilot would want to stop, rock the prop and get
it horz b4 belly landing....a few bucks here, a few bucks ther...hey,
b4 too long it add up...no?


Assuming it was a two blade prop, sure. But, that might be a bit much
to ask in the heat of the moment, knowing you're about to hear some
very bad grinding sounds on touchdown. It's probably better to just
ace the landing and not be distracted by the prop. At that point, the
insurance co owns the plane anyway.

I'm not surprised by Shirl's comment of the prop stopping immediately
on a top-overhauled engine. There's a lot more friction due to tight
clearances that haven't opened up yet. Glad to hear it was handled
well though, and turned out to be a non-event.

Kingfish wrote:

Assuming it was a two blade prop, sure. But, that might be a bit much
to ask in the heat of the moment, knowing you're about to hear some
very bad grinding sounds on touchdown. It's probably better to just
ace the landing and not be distracted by the prop. At that point, the
insurance co owns the plane anyway.

IIRC, Avweb once had a column on how trying to save the prop(s) before a
belly landing by shutting off the engine is not a good idea. Their main
points were
- Distracts pilots whose workload is already high enough (which would be
what you wrote)
- Commits you to the landing earlier than necessary: Once you stop the
engine, a go around is out of the question because there probably will not
be enough time for restart. If the rest of the airplane is fine, there's
normally no reason not to retry if something isn't quite right. By stopping
the engine(s), you reduce your options.
- Makes what already is an unusual situation - belly landing - an even more
unusual situation - belly landing combined with engine out landing.
- Some pilots in the past have apparently stopped the engine(s) too early,
then ran out of airspeed/altitude or neglected to monitor the airspeed
probably due to distraction, stalled, and crashed.

They argued that all of these factors point to trying to save the engines on
a gear-up landing being a potentially dangerous practice.