plane carrying NM governor has gear up landing.

[rbridges]

‘Wow, That Just Happened To Us’
Albuquerque Journal
Fri, May 25, 2012

SANTA FE – Gov. Susana Martinez said she saw sparks from the cabin window and thought the small, private plane she was riding in had blown a tire as it belly-flopped onto a Santa Fe Municipal Airport runway Wednesday night, landing gear still up.

Martinez said she did not initially know the plane returning her to the capital from a political event in Tucumcari had landed and skidded to a stop with its wheels retracted.

But the governor, her husband, Chuck Franco, and District Attorney Matt Chandler of Clovis, the only passengers on the single-engine Piper Malibu, walked away from the crash-landing unscathed and largely unshaken.

“It wasn’t scary, in the sense that we didn’t realize what had happened until it happened,” Martinez said Thursday morning after participating in a childhood reading event in Española. “The plane was not destroyed – nothing was broken off or flew off.

“It didn’t rattle us in the plane, it didn’t move us around, we didn’t bounce around, we didn’t feel a sudden thump, nothing,” Martinez said. “Truly what gave us the hint that something went wrong was the sound of metal on the asphalt and the sparks along the outside of the plane…

“Once we walked away and looked at it, we went, ‘Wow, that just happened to us.’ ”

The hard landing took place when the plane’s pilot, Sid Strebeck of Clovis, failed to redeploy the landing gear after strong winds forced him to give up his first attempt at landing and circle around for another try, according to multiple accounts of the incident.

Members of the governor’s security detail were waiting on the ground in Santa Fe but were not on the plane, Martinez spokesman Greg Blair said.

While no injuries were reported, the incident caused the Santa Fe airport to be shut down for more than four hours late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.

After the scraped-up plane came to a stop, Martinez and the other passengers disembarked and walked down the runway to a more secure location.

The pilot then contacted authorities, and the governor and her husband, after speaking with investigators, left the airport about 90 minutes after the incident occurred, according to Martinez’s Office. The plane was later towed away.

While complimenting the pilot for his response to the situation, Chandler said in retrospect the incident could have had a more dire outcome.

“I think there were a lot of opportunities for it to become a bad situation really quickly,” Chandler told the Journal.

Gear-up or belly landings carry the risk of the plane flipping over or catching fire, according to aviation safety experts.

A vocal critic of the state luxury jet purchased by then-Gov. Bill Richardson and sold by the state last year for $2.5 million, Martinez has flown three times on private planes for political events in the last 60 days, Blair said.

The Governor’s Office also said that pilots for any flights the governor will be a passenger on have their licenses and experience vetted prior to flying.

Strebeck, the plane’s pilot, is a Clovis developer who has more than 3,000 hours and 27 years of flying experience, according to the Governor’s Office. This week’s flight was his first with Martinez as a passenger, but Strebeck has previously flown Govs. Garrey Carruthers and Gary Johnson, the first-term governor said.

Martinez said Thursday that she would not hesitate to have him as her pilot again in the future.

“Mistakes happen and no one’s perfect,” she said.

As to the frequency of pilots failing or forgetting to deploy their landing gear before touching down, Santa Fe Airport Manager Jim Montman said he has seen the situation happen five or six times in the 11 years he has held the job.

“I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it’s not that rare either,” Montman said.

While Montman said he did not know the specifics of the fixed-wing, single-engine plane flown Wednesday by Strebeck, he said most planes have warning lights or other ways to alert a pilot if the landing gear is not in place.

Montman said the pilot was able to keep the plane on the runway during the landing – it came to rest near the intersection of the airport’s three runways – and avoid severe damage. However, its underbelly was scraped and its propeller was bent and twisted.

Strebeck did not immediately return several calls for comment Thursday.

The cost of Wednesday’s plane ride was paid for by the campaign of Senate candidate Angie Spears of Clovis, Martinez said.

The governor’s political action committee – Susana PAC – has given $5,000 to Spears’ campaign, and Martinez appeared at events Wednesday in both Tucumcari and Clayton to back Spears.

Martinez did not wait long to board another flight. She traveled by plane to Farmington with her husband Thursday afternoon for another reading event, at an elementary school.

[jetdriven]

Search this forum, and on Beechtalk, you will find that go-arounds cause a lot of gearups. Maybe more than half.  They break your habit pattern.

[SkyPilot]

I always worry about that after a long day.  I fly amphib seaplanes and it is a bigger concern landing gear down on the water than gear up on the pavement.  Either way expensive and embarrassing. I'm busy touching wood right now...