8. Emergency landing a Piper Navajo

Stories from my love of airplanes

By Fred Burlingame, Jr.

I was at Norwood, MA doing demonstration flights in the newly introduced Pressurized Navajo. Accompanied by Paul Neff, a salesman for Wiggins Airways, the distributor there, I was returning from Bradley Field where we had flown some prospects when the Landing Gear failed to extend. We spent about two hours trying every thing the factory could think of trying to get the Gear down, but to no avail. At about 1925 Hours we had burned off our fuel load and came in to land gear up. It is amazing how well one can land an airplane at a time like that. Still, it was very traumatic. All through one’s flying career the philosophy is “Don’t hurt the airplane” and as I approached I knew I was going to do maybe $75,000 damage to the airplane and nothing I could do could prevent it. Everything went well with minimal damage until Wiggin’s maintenance took a truck and put a rope on the props and dragged the airplane off the hard surface where the sod broke the skin and bent the fuselage formers causing an estimated additional $35,000 damage. A Word of caution: If you ever have a happenstance and you are not injured, take over the recovery operations. You are the only one who cares about your airplane. All the airport wants to do is get the junk off the runway and get the field open. Most of the damage in an accident is done by the recovery crew because they don’t care.

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