With no landing gear, it can only land on soft surfaces without damaging itself. The pilot's visibility is compromised during landing making it dangerous to set down near any infrastructure that will kill you.
You porpoise the landing. The front gear in just about every aircraft is not intended to take the weight that the rear can. End up in an unstable oscillation, until it gives.
The wheel well is not accessible from the plane. And of course the pilot would lower the gear when landing, they are not going to do a belly landing and destroy tens of millions of dollars of property and risk everyone on board's life to try to save one stowaway.
There have been several cases of the landing gear up/down lever getting wired backwards during maintenance. Not to worry, the gear has a 'squat switch' sensor that prevents the gear from being raised when the plane is on the ground. Unless you taxi over a bump and the switch decides it's now airborne. Crunch.
That landing gear only extends when the nose gear is off the ground. It's really just to prevent a tail strike. An alternate choice would be a little extra wheel up on the tail, as was done with the Concorde.
> if a (weight) load is detected on the landing gear
This state "weight on wheels" is used in a lot of other functionality, not just on military aircraft, as the hard stop for things that don't make sense if we're not airborne. So that makes sense (albeit obviously somebody needed to actually write this function)
Most obviously the gear retraction is disabled on planes which have retractable landing gear.
I'm not involved with the airline industry in any way, but I would think that since landing gear is a highly mechanical, moving piece with plenty of failure points, airliners are probably designed with a margin of error to withstand gearless landings without loss of life.
There are similar (but more basic) systems built into some retractable gear aircraft. They generally provide an audible alert if the plane appears about to land but the gear is still up.
Pilots still land gear up, even with the alarm sounding. There is (or at least was) even a public (YouTube) video of this happening from a passenger filming.
Landing a plane is not difficult (source: I’m a pilot) but there’s a lot going on. This is clearly a UI/UX issue but innovation is relatively slow in the certified market.
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