Same old stuff.

Twice, in less than a weeks time, I've had to divert due to landing gear malfunctions in the air. Last week we picked up freight at an airport in MI. As we raised the gear after takeoff, the right main gear unsafe light failed to extinguish. We recycled the gear several times and the light would not go out when the gear was retracted. A quick consultation with the QRH (quick reference handbook) produced no leads or any other tricks we could try to remedy the situation, so we decided to divert to Battle Creek. We were above our landing weight so we needed to fly around for a bit while we burned off fuel. The Lear can be quite the gas guzzler with the gear down and the spoilers extended. We were burning 3800pph or about 575 gallons an hour, so it didn't take that long to burn down to our max landing weight. After sliding down an ILS into BTL we were pleasantly surprised to see another company Lear Jet sitting on the ramp. So we quickly loaded our freight onto the new plane, gave a quick apology to the crew who's plane we were stealing and blasted off again for our destination to complete the trip.

Yesterday we were not so lucky as to completing our trip. We picked up our freight in Nashville and as we were climbing out through 13,000ft a gear unsafe light came on. Same problem, different plane. Again we were over weight for landing and had to fly around for about 40 min before we could land. This time we weren't bailed out by having another aircraft sitting on the ground for us ready to steal. Instead the freight was sent over to another nearby airport where one of our planes was going to be dropping off cargo a little later in the night. What was going to be a really good mileage trip turned into a bust. I'm just hoping we don't have to sit on a broken aircraft all week and not fly. There are still a few more days left in the week to fly, so we'll see what happens.