Yes, the little metal bar moves. I'm going to put painting it red on my
list. Still, looking at a big thing out side the plane as opposed to a
little thing down on the panel seems safer to me.

If you can train yourself to hear the noise, that's probably as good as
taking a look. It's easy to miss the absence of noise though as my friend
found out.

This wasn't taught to me, but since normal takeoff in a Cessna 172 is
with flaps up, I thought it would be a good idea to verify that the
flaps were in fact up before powering up for the "go" part of the
touch and go. So I do that every time: Land, or "arrive" on the
runway, snap the flaps switch to up saying "flaps up" in my mind and
sometimes out loud, then verify that they are both moving up and power
up when they get stowed.

Corky Scott

So what do you guys do in a 172, going into a short field, and having to abort
when you're in the flare? Consider a deer in the runway, or something like
that, that makes a go round the attractive choice? Will the airplane climb at a
couple of hundred feet a minute with 30 degree flaps? If it does, why are you
concerned about verifying flap retraction? Doesn't attitude, rate of climb,
that sort of thing, tell you everything you need to know to fly the miss? The
question I'm not asking very well is, how does knowing the flaps are not going
up change anything you're doing as you throttle up and go to best angle or rate
of climb airspeed? This is not trolling, I'm trying to understand the issue
better.

As a side note, the old Mooney Rangers had manual gear retraction, a great big
Johnson bar between the seats. The trick was, after takeoff, to retract the
gear with a little forward pressure on the yoke -- they'd suck right up, at the
cost a few hundred feet a minute of climb rate for 5 seconds or so. If you ever
watched a Ranger take off and wobble all over the runway heading, you could be
sure the pilot was stuggling with that damned bar, it felt like a 100 pound
curl if it wasn't done right.

Also, gear up landings were very rare, that great big thing was right there
against the panel, and besides, if your arm didn't hurt or your knuckles
weren't bleeding, the gear was probably still up.

Those airplanes had hydrolic flaps, you pumped them down, if I recall
correctly, and they 'bled' up smoothly.

Rangers also got carb ice in an instant. I seem to have a memory of the egt
right on the yoke, and that was a great indicator of icing. But I've other
memories of the clock being there.

Getting old does things to my memory. Someone will probably be telling me they
didn't have hyrdolic flaps or something.

..