Pilot doing ‘touch and go’ landings mistakenly put wheels up before crash at Jabara
Jabara Airport’s only runway was temporarily closed after a small aircraft failed to properly deploy its landing gear before a crash on Tuesday morning.
Emergency crews were called at around 10:15 a.m. to the airport’s runway at 3512 N. Webb Road, Kansas Highway Patrol troopers wrote in a crash report. The pilot, Blair Gordon Gill, 56, of Wichita, was not injured.
“The Pilot forgot to retract his landing gear after completing his first touch and go,” the crash report states. “On his second landing the Pilot thought he was extending the landing gear but was in fact retracting it. This resulted in a gear up landing on Runway 18.”
The aircraft is a fixed-wing, single-engine 1966 Mooney M20C, according to Federal Aviation Administration records.
Valerie Wise, Wichita Airport Authority air service and business development manager, said the runway would have to be inspected after the aircraft was removed. It was reopened Tuesday afternoon.
This story was originally published June 25, 2019 at 11:52 AM with the headline "Pilot doing ‘touch and go’ landings mistakenly put wheels up before crash at Jabara."