"Mooney lands gear-up at Syracuse, NY," or "Why it is important for IFR pilots to be proficient at holding patterns:"
Synopsis:A serene VFR day at Syracuse, NY, earlier this week. A VFR
Mooney (similar to that pictured in the link) checks in with Syracuse approach and is told to land straight in on runway 28. Behind him two commercial airliners are being vectored for approach and another VFR GA aircraft, a Piper, is coming in from the north.
Approach alerts the Mooney to departing helicopter traffic and doesn't receive a response, then attempts to raise him a few more times before taking action. Unbeknown to the controller, the Mooney lost his electrical system at that moment, went
NORDO (meaning NO RADio, or lost communications), and more importantly could not lower his gear. He continued inbound (presumably at some point being controlled by the tower's light gun, perhaps?) and then swung around to south to land on rwy 33. I am uncertain if the Mooney actually flew in circles for a few moments as the controller implied in this clip or simply broke off his approach to rwy 28 to land rwy 33, which is also called "circling" in aviation-speak.
Confusion momentarily erupted as the approach controller was unable to ascertain whether the intersection of both runways was blocked, so he had to put both airliners and the other GA aircraft into holding patterns while airport operations inspected the accident scene and the runways.
The clip concludes with a ground-based pilot commenting on the Mooney's ability to hit the centerline.
Clip Information:The clip has been edited for gaps in communications and non-essential communications, so it is NOT real-time. Even with the edits it is over 8 minutes long. I had to lower the bitrate to get the audio file under the 5 MB limitation here but the quality is still pretty good for a voice-only audio file.
Airport Diagram:Note that my depiction of the Mooney's approach is estimated but it should give you a general idea of the direction of landing, where he touched down, and where he came to rest (the star on the diagram) in relation to the runway intersection.
