Every report I saw/read mentioned them foaming the runway for fire prevention (and some small fires still started)

True, but cirrus also has fixed gear, so the parachute is not designed to mitigate gear extension failure....

Okay, I read some more articles and found mention of it. The TV coverage I initially saw did not show/mention it.

I'm surprised if they foamed. Foaming the runway for an emergency landing is rarely done these days. It was long ago determined that it had a very limited benefit and several big drawbacks.

For example:
-Where do you foam? You can't foam the entire runway, so there are different places to foam depending on which gear are unextended. Depending on the nature of the emergency and the current weather conditions, hitting that one precise patch of foam could be challenging.
-It can take up to an hour to lay the foam. Depending on the nature of the emergency and the aircraft's remaining fuel available, this may be a prohibitive delay.
-It requires a certain type of foam that many airports didn't carry.
-It requires a great deal of water to lay the foam, along the lines of thousands of gallons for even these small strips. Do we really want to empty the ARFF truck tanks right before an emergency landing when they may be needed for firefighting?
-It can't be used in all weather conditions.
-Even if none of the above are a factor, it still doesn't help much. The FAA, ICAO, and many aircraft manufacturers (including Boeing if I'm not mistaken) do not recommend foaming runways. The captain can still request it and some airports obviously can do it, but there's a really good chance he/she will be told "unable" (in the US, at least).

Just spoke to Fire station captain friend: Foam is used to suppress fire by covering it and choking off Oxygen. It is great with aircraft fire for it does not splatter the ignited fuel around. For the same amount of water in a tanker, the use of the foam agent increases the efficiency 100X.
In order for it to work it has to be ON TOP OF ANY FIRE. Foam on the runway with fire above will be a waste of foam.

Agreed - everybody knows you need a Toyota Tundra to handle such a landing. After all, the Tundra can withstand a direct meteor strike and a Loch Ness Monster attack. ^

The alternate extension system on many Boeing aircraft has an actuator that is supposed to simply drop a hook out of the way that allows gravity to free fall the gear into place. Sometimes corrosion in that actuator will reduce the movement of the hook, or stop it all together. Alternate extension tests can be performed on the ground, but it does not always require jacking the airplane up and retracting the gear to test an actual free fall, sometimes it is simply activating the system and seeing if the actuator moves, even with the airplane weight on the gear as it sits on the ground, no actual gear movement takes place, just the actuator is checked to see if it moves. Alternate extension tests can be performed in the air as well, but that makes many pilots nervous, as it take the airplane out of the normal and routine flight envelope, so many airlines to do not do this test in the air, as it is not required by the Boeing maintenance manual.

None of this is speaking to this specific case, or any specific airline, it is just from my knowledge and experience on Boeing wide body aircraft and their systems.

Thanks PlaneMechanic for the insight.. Amazing some of the knowledge communicated here in FT!

IIRC.. on television, I've seen planes land with the body sliding on the runway.. I suppose there would have to be major malfunction to cause a plane to land with one or more less landing gear..

The electrical/gravity back-up system is supposed to open the gear doors, let the gear fall out and lock in the down position. You're right that if something happened and the gear somehow collapsed that there would be little the pilots could do to control what happened after that, and it could have been calamitous.

Hardly anyone uses the Cirrus spin parachute because the pilots are generally inexperienced and they also don't want to destroy a $500000 toy! No idea why you'd buy a Cirrus with such vast wealth anyways... buy a real plane like a Mooney or Bonanza.

Depends on the nature of the gear failure....

If the deployment system is malfunctioning but the gear itself is fine, many planes have a secondary redundant system to lower and retract them. There is also a gravity system in which they simply drop and manually lock in place.

And then there is the belly landing! Pilots are trained to land without gear, and most airports (save for tiny private and civil ones) have foams for just such an event.

Boeing recommends against having the runway foamed. Save the foam and water in the trucks for fighting any fire that may start after the landing.