Low or No?!! ...

[Mark Allen M]

This photo was taken at EAA Airventure 2018. Does this seem a bit low to start retracting the landing gear? As can be seen, the gear is already half way up.
Nothing negative, just wondering what others think.

[Cubs2jets]

Well... He's airborne and not using them anymore! Might as well put them away?

C2j

[k5083]

Premature retraction. At my age, I can relate.

August

[Hooligan2]

As long as he didn't sink the way I once saw a T-6 drop after pulling in the gear up early on a grass airfield - the rear seater was a certain Sir Richard Branson, so had an unintended gear up landing been the case, it most certainly would have made the press! No damage done but had the grass been in need of a trim you'd probably have mowing evidence on the prop blades.

Don't know what it was about White Waltham - the only other time I visited that airfield, a British Airways VC-10 also got spectacularly low during several passes - a number of images can be seen on Jelle Hieminga's superb VC-10 website: https://www.vc10.net/Memories/WhiteWaltham.html

[Saville]

If he went straight into demonstration aerobatics from the take off then retracting the gear that early makes sense.

[RyanShort1]

It very much depends on the length of the runway and what's on the end you're approaching. Sometimes you'd get stopped faster in a belly landing than with the wheels down. Having survived an unavoidable belly landing due to blown hydraulics, my view on getting the gear up has changed somewhat.

[JohnB]

What does the manual say?

For fun, I checked my P-40 and P-47 pilot handbooks (both original and given to me by a friend who flew 47Ns postwar).

The P-40 says to raise the gear "...when a wheels down landing cannot be done on the remaining runway".

The Thunderbolt book just say to raise the gear "... when definitely airborne".
This Mustang is definitely airborne.

Of course some pilots have the attitude...
"We don't need no stinkin' manuals" (with apologies to John Houston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre").

Still, with the cost of a Merlin overhaul, new prop and radiator being what they are, I wouldn't have done that without a very good reason (which this pilot may of had).

I won't second guess him since he has more time in a Mustang than I do.

[Archer]

Apart from what the manuals say, any consensus on when to retract the undercarriage can be difficult to achieve. Retracting when you are no longer able to carry out a landing on the runway ahead of you is one useful piece of advice. The other one is to retract it when you have a positive rate of climb. Then of course you may have a max gear extended speed that you want to stay below.

All this is irrelevant when you have a pilot who just wants to demonstrate how pretty the aeroplane looks when low down with the gear up

[Cubs2jets]

Sometimes it has to do with performance...

C2j