Gear Up Take Off anyone ?

[Liquid_Charlie]

I actually had one come up on my six and pass directly over the aircraft. Still up high but a flaming tail and it certainly got me thinking. No one would have ever know why we fell out of the sky and just put it down to "pilot error"
We also had a full load of gasoline in leaky rubber bags - damn they would have seen that one for miles.

[digits]

Selecting gear up prior to starting T/O roll has been around and people doing it ever since the discovery that the gear will not retract until unweighted. So there was always people temping fate.

For all the guys/girls who got away with this there are a lot who didn't - no surprises there.

What’s the theoretical operational reason for doing that ?

That question can be asked for all aviation fuckups - people just do stupid things and sometime pay the price.

There will be no new causes for aviation aviation accidents until someone is shot down by an alien space craft.

Maybe I have too much faith in the military pilots, but I doubt they would do it this way if they weren't trained for it. If they were trained to do so, that means someone at some point must have thought about it and decided that it was a good idea. There must have been some (perceived?) advantage to doing so. Curious what that could be.

[John Swallow]

While I doubt it is done anymore in the military, back in the day there was the odd instance of such activity. However, I never heard of selecting the gear handle up on the roll in the Sabre, T-33, Tutor, CF-5, or CF-104... There have been instances of just breaking ground and THEN selecting gear up whilst maintaining minimum height above the runway.