Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Wheels up Landing

That'll leave a mark.

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/avi...g-at-merrill-field-airport-in-anchorage/

Those C-130's are workhorses for sure. Bent propeller tips add a custom look.

That's a DC-3 not a C130

Not too bad for a belly landing.

whats a couple engines between friends?

Wonder what the relevance of power loss in one engine had to do with not lowering the landing gear?

I was left sitting in one of those DC-3s on the runway in Anchorage for two hours while a guy ran in and out of the plane and up and down one wing trying to figure out a issue they were having.

This was a little while back, Reeve Aleutian Airways was the operator.😉

Dickheads wouldn't let us get off the plane and the guy working on it didn't appear very competent, like just from his appearance I don't think I'd let him work on my lawn mower.

It was cold, they didn't have blankets, I asked to be let off and they refused.
We were on our way to St Paul Island for the Opilio season, it was early January.
Nothing like 800 miles of open water in a POS of a plane.

Eventually we took off, didn't get far, like 5 or 10 miles and the right engine locked up.

We circled back and landed safely. Next day Reeve Aleutian had Alaska airlines take us to St. Paul on one of their jets.

If ya never done it, landing on a gravel runway in a jet is a experience in itself. You'd swear you were doing a belly landing.
The gravel kicking up makes a ungodly noise.

Think I might have just found the problem with our plane..

Bob Reeve, owner of Reeve Aleutian Airways bought his first DC-3 for $20,000 with $3,000 down and the balance payable over 3 years. The cost of conversion to civilian standard was quoted at $50,000 but Reeve did the work himself at a cost of $5,000.

If we'd only had the internet in those days.........

This two pilots ain't gonna unpucker for weeks.

I too wondered about the landing gear.

Forgot?
Lost hydraulics?
Too busy chit 'n and a gitten?

Wheels up, wheels down, it can get confusing....

50+ years ago Bob Reeve was my friend and my boss. I would often ask him who is the best pilot in Alaska.....??? He would always answer, his son-in-law.

There were over 10,000 C-47 / DC-3 variants built and there are still over 300 of them in use. Not bad for an aircraft that first started flying over 80 years ago, although I see that this one is only 69 years old - a veritable youngster.

drover

Sure was taking a lot of power to taxi 😁

Seen a pilot waste a Magnum Beaver and his life due to that error one day.

Landing with your gear down in the water with amphibious floats seems to often end with a similar result.

https://planecrashmap.com/plane/ak/N4478/

Pretty sure he was losing altitude quickly at the end of it. Listening to the ATC recording it sounded like they wanted to return to Ted Stevens, but couldn't make it. They came in so low that they cleaned the tops of these trees off about 3 blocks from my work. I don't think they could have stretched out their flight any more than they did and pretty sure that dropping their gear would have put them down sooner.

Some other videos with ATC.

Alice Rogoff flying?

looks like he used "all" of the runway. Next stop Northway Mall.

He probably was loaded to the gills and in a bad profile when he lost that engine and unable to maintain altitude, much less get any airspeed back. Emergency procedure for single engine calls for flaps and gear retracted because that's the only way to maintain altitude - and when making the kind of turns he needed to get back to a runway, he was right at stall speed - he probably didn't roll out of his turn until he was on short final, and wouldn't have had the time (and altitude) to extend the gear.

Thanks for that info.

We fuel those guys all the time including yesterday when that happened, Offshoreman is right they didn`t have time to lower the landing gear as they were losing airspeed too fast and would have stalled out . If you saw how old those planes were you`d never want to fly in one . I think them and desert air are the only ones using them still. Mike Reeve still fly`s but he`s running a Navaho. I got a good chuckle on the rogoff comment LOL

A couple less engines is a C27. The Air ForCE cut and ran on the C27 in no time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alenia_C-27J_Spartan