airtraffic

Author Topic: Plane lands at Essex airport without deploying landing gear  (Read 225 times)

Offline KB4TEZ

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1764
Plane lands at Essex airport without deploying landing gear
« on: January 13, 2025, 11:46:32 UTC »
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/essex/2025/01/12/plane-lands-at-essex-airport-without-deploying-landing-gear/77660031007/
(they never indicated they were having a gear "issue", but forgetting something like this ?  kudos to the controller, who got real busy, real quick.
even the surrounding airparks got busy, Morristown eventually said stop)

FAIRFIELD — A small plane crashed on the runway as it was landing Sunday afternoon, police said.

Just after 2:20 p.m., police received a 911 call from Essex County Airport. Fairfield police, fire and EMS responded and found the plane, a Piper Seminole P-44, stopped on the runway without its landing gear deployed.

The pilot “failed to put the landing gear down before landing” as the plane approached the runway, said Officer Stacy Chiarolanza, public information officer for the Fairfield Police Department.

The plane “landed gear-up on its belly,” she said.  The flight instructor, a 31-year-old Paterson man, and his student, a 32-year-old man from Elizabeth, were not injured in the crash. The plane belongs to Air Fleet Training Systems at Essex County Airport, police said.

“The circumstances surrounding this crash could have been much worse, and these gentlemen are very lucky,” Chiarolanza said.