Don Rogers PPrune obituary

Don Rogers, former chief test pilot for Avro Canada, has just passed away.
Included in his obituary on PPrune is the following:
“The Jetliner flew for the first time in 1949, with hundreds of cheering A.V. Roe lining the runway. Mr. Rogers took over the testing on the Jetliner’s 16th flight, and soon discovered the first major gremlin when the landing gear refused to extend. (An engineer flying with Mr. Rogers broke a rib trying to get the wheels down with an emergency handle.) The airport manager urged him to ditch the Jetliner in Lake Ontario, but Mr. Rogers was bent on saving the airplane, and made a belly landing on the runway.
The problem was quickly traced to an easily fixed design flaw. Mr. Rogers minimized the drama of the wheels-up landing: “. . . there was no problem at all as far as we were concerned,” he said.”
This was in fact the second flight with Jimmy Orrell, Avro Chief test pilot in command and Don as the co-pilot, on 17 August 1949. As recounted by Jimmy himself in the “Vapour Trails” anthology edited by Mike Lithgow, the desperate attempts to lower the mainwheels were broadcast live across Canada and the USA. Jimmy even offered Don and the flight engineer (who did have a broken rib) the chance to bale out, which they both declined to do. The anthology contains a blurred photograph of the eventual landing on the nosewheel and engine tailpipes, taken by a rather nervous Avro employee. By this time there were no hydraulics and hence no flaps, which led to some float and a landing further down the airfield than planned. There was only slight damage to the aircraft, with repairs completed in 5 weeks. The cause of the problem was that the undercarriage up locks would not come far enough back to release the wheels.