A B737-300's right main landing gear indicated unsafe down so the crew cycled the gear three times before getting it down an locked. Apparently the QRH was not consulted.
Synopsis
A B737-300's right main landing gear indicated unsafe down so the crew cycled the gear three times before getting it down an locked. Apparently the QRH was not consulted.
Narrative
I reviewed the logbook and found a crew had written up a landing gear issue. They had a right Gear Unsafe light stay on when they put the gear down. They cycled the gear and on the third attempt they were able to get three green down and locked lights. They wrote it up on landing and Maintenance cleared the write up. It has been over a week; I can't remember what they did. The aircraft was returned to service. When we put the gear down for landing we had the same problem. I then informed the Tower that we had an issue that we needed to work on and asked them to send us somewhere so we could work it out. (I didn't mention to them at that time what the problem was.) I then looked at the fuel we had onboard so as to know how long we had to work on this gear issue and got the QRH out. The First Officer continued to fly the aircraft and I worked the problem. We remembered what the other crew did to solve the problem so we cycled the gear three times and were able to get the gear down and locked the green light on the right gear. Even though the QRH does not address cycling the gear; we chose to try this anyway since another crew had success with it. We landed safely; called Maintenance; and wrote it in the logbook. They took the aircraft out of service.
Second reporter narrative
Upon landing gear extension; we got two green lights for both the left main and nose landing gear and the red unsafe gear light for the right main. Both the Captain and I had read this when we accomplished our cockpit preflight of the aircraft logbook. As the Captain was reading through the QRH; we also discussed the logbook write up and the crew's actions from a few days earlier. We decided to cycle the gear as the prior crew had done successfully. We got three green lights on our third gear extension. We tried to use all the information available to us from the logbook (by using both the QRH and the aircraft's history) to successfully rectify the gear problem.
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Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.