THREE GREENS - GOOD: TWO GREENS, UH-OH!!

 Tuesday 6th December

Summer is here and, after a thunderstorm yesterday evening and a dodgy weather forecast, I wasn't too optimistic about getting over to Tauranga in DQV to fly the Stearman.  So it turned out.  The cloud base over Hamilton airport was around 1200' and much of the surrounding area was cloudy.  I phoned Pete at Classic Flyers and to my question about the weather he replied, "C**p, low cloud all around" (so, not much change from the weather report a couple of hours previously).

That was much as expected so, as the Hamilton circuit was flyable, I decided to take DQV up for a few laps.  All started off well and I made an early downwind call for a touch and go, checked the airspeed was below 125Kt and lowered the gear.  There was the usual clunking and trim change as the mains came down and the two main green lights came on.  The nose gear light flashed briefly and then went out.  A glance up the panel showed that the yellow "gear in transit" light was still illuminated.  Oh, dear!  (A bit of retrospective: this had happened to me on 22nd November coming back from a local flight except the nose light didn't flash and recycling the gear fixed the problem).

So, I raised the gear, waited a few seconds, and lowered it again, and..... the same thing happened except the nose gear light didn't light at all!!  OK, no panic, it's probably electrical, but in a fairly busy circuit I thought it best to make an urgency (Pan, Pan) call to the tower and told them I would extend downwind to try to sort it.  A third gear lowering was successful: after a bit of a pause, all three greens glowed and stayed glowing.  Sigh of relief, quick check I had all the downwind checks done and I turned base about 3 miles or so South of the 36R threshold.  I called the tower to say I was turning base and would be for a full stop.  I made a lower than usual, very shallow approach, and got full flap down about half a mile out aiming to stay at 70KT til over the threshold and then try to keep the flare going to touch down on the mains at as slowly as I dared (about 60Kt) keeping the nosewheel up as long as possible - just in case.  This worked fine, I rolled the mains onto the tarmac (one of my best landings ever!!) and kept pulling back on the column to keep the nose up.  The speed bled off quite quickly and once down to below 40Kt I gently released the back-pressure on the column and the nosewheel touched down and held - hooray!!!

So, I taxied back to the club and reported the problem to Roger (CFI) who knew about my previous DQV undercarriage problem.  He reckoned it was probably electrical, a relay or something similar, and agreed it needed sorting out.  So, I left it in his capable hands and went off to attempt some Christmas shopping!!