An even more interesting air disaster is United Airlines Flight 173. Just prior to landing a malfunction caused the indicator for the landing gear being lowered to fail to indicate that it actually was lowered. The plane circled the airport while the crew concentrated on figuring out what was wrong. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed.
It's easy to get side tracked by a problem while losing sight of the big picture. That crash led to a complete rethinking of the way planes are flown.
It was also caused by "cockpit gradient" the flight engineer and FO knew about the problem but were reluctant to point it out to the captain (because it was such a silly little thing)
That is interesting. I'm sure I've read of planes doing a fly-by for the control tower to assess whether the landing gear is actually down or not in situations like this. Were there reasons something like this wasn't attempted in this case?
I've just been reading an autobiography of a WWII aviator (a tailgunner in a B-17). He mentions that for planes with substantial damage, it was standard procedure to bring the plane in on its belly with no landing gear. This was because there was a good chance the landing gear itself was damaged, and if so, having it there would do far more harm than good.
If it's possible to bring in a B-17 on its belly as a preventative measure, surely it's possible to do so with a modern airliner when the alternative is a real crash.
I do not know whether you are right, but I think most successful B-17 belly landings would involve ditching all cargo (i.e. bombs) before landing. AFAIK, doing that with a modern airliner only is possible in Hollywood.
A vivid example of forgetting to fly the plane is the similar case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401 where the landing gear light bulb was burnt out. While investigating this, the crew didn't notice that they were slowly descending and 101 people died when they hit the ground. Last words: "We're still at 2,000 feet, right?"
It's easy to get side tracked by a problem while losing sight of the big picture. That crash led to a complete rethinking of the way planes are flown.