What a gear-up costs: even for a modest single, the bidding starts at $40,000 or 20 years worth...

It's a groaner we've all heard: There are those who have and those who will land with the gear in the wells. The notion is absurd, of course. All of us know plenty of pilots who've retired from flying having never scratched an airplane, let alone scrubbing the antennas off with the million-dollar runway slide.

Gear-up landings happen to pilots of all experience levels, but there's good evidence that it tends to be a high-timer type of mishap for reasons we don't fully understand. Landing gear accidents are more of an embarrassment than a serious safety problem because