SureGear GWS (Gear Warning System)

Our first production version of FlySeer products is the multiple patents pending SureGear GWS (Gear Warning System). You may wonder — Why is another gear warning system needed? Don’t most retractable aircraft already have a gear warning system or an automatic gear extension system?

To answer your questions, first here’s WHY we developed SureGear:

• A friend and client who’s a great pilot, well experienced, owner of a Bonanza, most of his time in retractable gear aircraft, recently had a gear up landing. We had the privilege of some in-depth conversations, and as is typical, his incident involved a long chain of events, including: a full day round trip where a passenger had a medical issue causing both delay and pilot concern/distraction, active weather on the return trip, some ATC confusion and a much slower aircraft in front of him on final. 
• These incidents continue to happen with regularity:
  • Per November 26, 2020 Mastery of Flight, Flying Lessons Article, “…one of the five or more U.S. pilots every week to suffer a gear-up landing. AOPA’s Air Safety Institute tells us that gear-up and gear collapse landings are collectively the very most costly class of piston aircraft general aviation insurance claims fleetwide—astounding given that about 80% of the piston fleet has fixed landing gear. I’ve made a career-long study of Landing Gear-Related Mishaps (LGRMs), including this 28-month fleetwide study that led to these observations on LGRMs.”
  • Per this Aviation Consumer article, The $60K Slide: Post Gear-Up Strategies:  “We looked at NTSB-listed gear-up landings that occurred between 2005 and 2015. We found a total of 156. That’s an average of 15 a year or a little over one a month. We suspect the actual occurrence is several times higher than that”.  Reason for significant under-reporting is NTSB 830, which defines reportable accidents and incidents, has specific language that precludes the requirement to report typical gear-up landing damage because it doesn’t meet the threshold of “substantial damage.” So these are often “incidents” rather than reportable accidents.
  • According to the 1/20/2021 AOPA Aviation eBrief survey, insurance cost and availability is the biggest issue facing General Aviation in 2021. While not a scientific survey, insurance is definitely on the mind of the retractable gear pilot.

• Last, the existing systems tend to get misadjusted and/or disabled by pilots/mechanics. Typical GWS work on a combination of throttle position and gear not being down. As many retractables land with a bit of power, that may be added to for crosswind, and are rarely adjusted correctly, workings are questionable, and will be set at different levels in different aircraft, even of the same type.  Automatic gear extension systems, such as on the Piper Arrow, can be pilot over-ridden, so will often be turned off intentionally, such as to practice slow flight with gear up, so are far from fool (or pilot) proof.

Here’s HOW SureGear works:

• SureGear works independently of aircraft systems to maintain it’s settings, more accurately determine when the aircraft is actually landing, and avoid false alerts that may cause a pilot to ignore SureGear over time. As an example that work well for Bonanza type aircraft, all of the below indications must occur before alerting the pilot:
  • Altitude below 1200′ AGL — if you aren’t close to the ground, you aren’t landing
  • Vertical Speed below -200ft/min — if you aren’t descending, you aren’t landing
  • Airspeed below 120 kts — if you aren’t going slow, you aren’t landing
  • …And if all 3 of the above are true, then you are landing
• SureGear allows you to set your desired alert values, not some antiquated “factory spec”. Unlike most permanently installed avionics, SureGear allows you to set the parameters you want to use for alerting.
• SureGear is self-arming, just turn it on and forget it. SureGear will not arm it’s alerting function until it sees one of these conditions:
  1. Altitude above alerting altitude and speed above alerting speed
  2. Altitude above alerting altitude and climbing (even if ground speed less than alerting speed)
• SureGear is self-clearing.  If SureGear is alerting, and the pilot climbs above alerting altitude or initiates a climb, or increases speed above alerting velocity, SureGear automatically clears the alert 
• Additional monitoring of gear position will be added in a future version.

Early Prototype Video