P-40 Gear collapse Texas March 16, 2019

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Hopefully not too serious --no casualties thats good.

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The airframe looks abbout as unbent as is possible in the circumstances, but the prop tips obviously touched under power - I fear the engine is toast. Still, old planbes can be rebuilt.

Adrian

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The only thing I have to add is that I'm pretty sure I recognize the gal in the brown boots at the 1.51 mark...She looks quite good from the front too :)

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I wonder how much a new prop will be....

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The gear down-lock on a P-40 is very tricky and non-intuitive. There are very many P-40 photos like that one in the video, from WWII and more recent.

I don't know any details of this incident, but perhaps I can be useful by saying that we've stayed out of trouble with ours for over 10 years by me teaching that with a P-40, there is no visual or aural indication of gear down-lock. It's best to consider the indicators as something that will tell you if the gear is extended, but not if they're locked. (Big gotcha.) The only certain indicator of down-lock is the hydraulic resistance of the hand-pump when the cylinder has reached full extension. And even then it will unlock by itself if you don't trap the pressure there by moving the gear selector to Off.

It's a 1935 system for the P-36, when retractable gear was a fairly new idea, and it delivered enough gear-up incidents that later airplanes used different controls and methods entirely.

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Accumulator failure was mentioned over at WIX.