Originally Posted by
dhuey
A video posted upthread gave me the impression that if you yank those manual levels, the gear will come down very quickly, via gravity alone.
Of course I don’t know anything about this stuff, but I am noticing that several experts have said they cannot understand why that gear wasn’t down.
Not quite as simple as it sounds, especially if critical for time and already very busy handling the aircraft under an emergency.
The non-flying pilot needs to be ‘heads down’ to locate the panel, open it and pull each if the levers in turn. During this time, the other pilot is doing it all. It might be 30 seconds for the non-flying pilot to to do this process.
The gear will fall under gravity, but make take a moment or two to fully get down to the ‘locked’ position, especially if the airspeed is high. For some types it might even be necessary to pull some ‘g’ (by turning) to get the gear fully down and locked. This emergency/alternate gear lowering might take another 30-60 secs.
Korean media suggest the crew had total of 3 mins from declaring the mayday after the birdstrike to being on the ground. We don’t know why such an expedited course was taken.
As to why the gear was not lowered, there can be many reasons (from simply being overlooked to complex systems failures), so hopefully the CVR and FDR will reveal all/most of the answers.