I wonder if their old age and thousands of hours spent close to a plane engine played a significant factor in them not hearing that high pitched warning signal (about 1400hz if i am not mistaken).
I don't know french, so i don't know if they said that they heard the signal, so are you sure they heard it or are you only assuming they had to hear it ?
Everything (and i mean it) that is fitted in any plane needs to be certified, so no warning with such thing as "too high pitched so that only young pilots can hear it" can be certified.
Also, 1400hz is not "that" high pitched.
They heard it, it's pretty sure, in the sense that their brain got the information, but they didn't pay attention. You have to add that they were aware something was wrong (they felt they were too fast compared to their configuration/power settings/pitch attitude and didn't get it was cause of the absence of gear). So it's a typical example of human factors : contributing factors being they were stressed by the fact they had to monitor a previous aircraft pretty tight in the vicinity of the circuit (from what i read) and some other pressure i don't remember. Another contributing factor is the poor design of the alarm (although it's still a light aircraft so it's not an official requirement) since a continuous sound gets erased easily by someone's mind when he's stressed, until he gets back his abilities and expands his Situation Awareness again. It happened to me already quite a few times when you do tricky exercises for an hour, you completely ignore this kind of alarm. On my dual engine training, i had the same alarm for each engine, and when we played with one engine inoperative procedures, faking a shutdown by reducing thrust to zero for one engine, it would sound, and it was a simple alarm so it would sound as long as you are in this configuration. So it was easy to forget the gear down cause when you're supposed to have a horn sound for the gear, you had already been in a constant horn environment for like 10mn. Never had the problem, cause we were trained as pro pilots so we have strict checklists, and the instructor smiles and says "didn't you forget something ?" but it can happen, it actually happened in my school a few years ago (exactly the same as in the video). It's crazy since this is the most basic thing you do in a plane, but a brain is able to forget any stupid things under exterior or internal stress conditions.
The result being they were concentrated on those tasks, stressed, and their Situation Awareness was poor. They didn't react correctly (which is : something is wrong ? -> don't even think, go around and sort it out later). And just discovered it when it was too late. They were lucky it was quite a smooth landing overall.
What they say in french is just things like "didn't you extend the gear ??" "no no" "i was sure there were something wrong" "i know"
Point being : with contributing factors such as stress (natural stress in creepy houses at night), wanting to see things before even seing them, interpretations, false sense informations, one can easily create things in his head, the human brain is just so imperfect !
It has a bit derailed from the topic though I just wanted to add a brick to the wall
