User Guide

152
153
WHEN TO RETRACT
The airplane will climb a lot better once the gear is “in the
wells,” but if there’s any chance of its settling back to the ground
- for example, a premature heavyweight takeoff on a hot day - it’s
awfully nice to have those wheels down there! Airline procedure
is for the captain to call for gear retraction as soon as the copilot
verifies, from the altimeter and VSI, that the airplane is climbing
strongly and calls out “positive rate.” Lacking a copilot, we can
use a much simpler criterion, and one particularly useful in case
of an engine failure in this single-engine airplane: leave the gear
down until there’s no longer enough runway ahead to land on,
then retract it. Do not exceed 126 knots airspeed until the gear
has been retracted.
When you move the landing gear handle to the “up” posi-
tion, a number of things happen. The electrically-powered
hydraulic pump runs, and the amber “HYD PUMP” indicator on
the annunciator panel illuminates. The three green “down and
locked” lights next to the gear handle go out as each wheel
unlocks and begins to retract, and the red “GEAR WARN” annun-
ciator light illuminates. When the gear is completely retracted,
both GEAR WARN and HYD PUMP lights will extinguish. There
are no mechanical uplocks; inflight, the gear is held in the retract-
ed position by hydraulic pressure trapped in the system. In the
event a hydraulic leak or failure allows one or more of the gears
to “bleed down,” the red GEAR WARN light will illuminate.
WHEN TO EXTEND
The simplistic answer, of course, is “before you land,
dummy!” But there’s more to it. In addition to its primary function,
the gear serves a very valuable secondary one: allowing you to
control descents with airplane configuration and drag, rather than
only by power reduction. As we’ll see when we start examining
the engine in detail, rapid, large power reductions are very hard
on the engine; in many cases, it’s better to make only a small
power reduction, achieving the additional required descent rate
by adding landing gear, flaps, or both.
For all that, though, the Malibu Mirage is still a single-
engine airplane (albeit, in the eyes of the FAA, both a “complex”
and a “high performance” one); the basic skills you learned in the
172 are entirely applicable to this airplane as well. Even the oper-
ating speeds aren’t all that different, particularly in the landing
pattern. True, the Malibu Mirage can cruise at well over 200
knots--but it’s optimized to do so at high altitude, where the indi-
cated airspeeds may be only around 135 knots (this is the reason
for its relatively long, narrow, sailplanelike wings). There are,
however, a number of additional systems to learn about; those,
and their management inflight, are some of the main subject
material in this chapter. In addition, we’ll use the Malibu Mirage
as our platform for further exploration of the arcane world of
instrument flying; and some of its more sophisticated navigation-
al instruments are described in the second “Radio Flyer” section
of this manual.
FOLDING ROLLERS
Obviously, one of the main differences between the Mirage
and the 172 is that the Malibu Mirage has retractable landing
gear. For many pilots, their first flight in a retractable-gear airplane
is a real milestone, their first move into the world of complex and
high-performance machines. Insurance companies, too, seem to
take retractable gear very seriously, at least in terms of how much
experience they want you to have before they’ll turn you loose in
a retractable airplane without adult supervision.
That being said, however, there’s nothing particularly magic
about retractable gear. If you were to forget to retract the wheels
after takeoff, the airplane would fail to realize much of its normal
performance, but there would be no damage to anything but the
pilot’s ego. Forget to extend them before you land, however, and
the results will be considerably more impressive. It’s been said
that there are only two kinds of pilots: those who will someday
make a gear-up landing, and those who have already. It’s also said
that if you’re not sure you’ve landed gear-up (and this may be
more applicable to FLY! than in the real world), a sure clue is that
it will take much more power than usual to taxi.
Basic operation of the gear is about as simple as you can
imagine: retract it after you take off and please, please, extend it
before you land! There are a few fine points, however.
Flight Instruction
Flight Instruction