Gear Down?

My commercial training has been placed on an unexpected hold... Turns out that the Arrow I'm training in (the only one at the flight school) had a gear up incident yesterday. While I don't know whether it was due to mechanical difficulties or pilot error, I thought I'd take a moment to re-emphasize the importance of checking that the gear is down and locked, and, even though I'm not a CFI, point out some strategies that you can use to avoid the dreaded gear-up landing.

John & Martha King actually outline these strategies very well in their Practical Risk Management for Takeoffs & Landings video. In particular, they mention that you should put the gear down at standardized points during your approach to landing:

1. On downwind, abeam the numbers. This is where you can perform a GUMP check: (G)as, (U)ndercarriage, (M)ixture, (P)ropeller.
2. Whenever leaving the pattern altitude. This rule may seem like a repeat of #1, but consider that probably the most common cause of a gear up landing is a distraction. Maybe the tower asks you to extend your downwind, and you don't put the gear down abeam the numbers as a result. Or, maybe you're flying a non-standard pattern, like straight-in or base-leg entry.
3. On an ILS, do the GUMP check when you're about to intercept the glideslope - maybe within a dot. In some airplanes, like a Cessna Cardinal RG, if you reduce the power to the recommended setting (17" or so, if I remember) and simultaneously put the gear down when you're one dot high on the glideslope, you'll get a nice glideslope capture combined with an approximately 500 fpm descent - perfect for flying the ILS.
4. On a nonprecision approach, do the GUMP check as you cross the final approach fix (FAF).

When you're on final, it also wouldn't hurt to reconfirm once more that the gear is indeed down, together with other items such as mixture and prop settings. I can say from experience that this little check has saved me once on an instrument approach, already past the FAF: "fuel pump is on, gas is on fullest tank, mixture is set, prop is full forward, gear is ... oh, darn, the gear!!" I had a CFII in the right seat, who saw the whole thing - but didn't say anything so that I could spot my own mistake. I probably learned more from that one flight than from all the times I heard people say "put the gear down".

You can have other methods, such as flows, for ensuring that the gear is down. But whatever method you develop, use it, and help eliminate the saying: "retractable pilots fall into two categories: those who landed gear up, and those who will."