The Gear Solution By Maj. Carl Forsling, USMC
was the MV-22B instructor on what seemed like a routine familiarization flight at a local civilian airport. My student was an Air Force major doing his transition training from the MH-53. In the back, I had a crew-chief instructor and two students doing their initial V-22 crew-chief training. We did the normal series of conversion-mode (helicopter-style) landing patterns, and my student was doing fine. We were ready to start the fun stuff: stretching it out to airplane-mode for some much quicker laps around the pattern. My student had the controls and ready for takeoff.
I turned around the forward-looking-infrared radar (FLIR) and saw my right gear fully down, with the left and nose gear still retracted.
September-October 2008
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