Comment by Mawr

A more typical question would be whether landing on water would be a better idea. The answer is always no — it is always better for an aircraft to land at an airport. Always.

The most core reason is that airports are designed for airplanes to land on them. Everything else follows from that. But, concretely:

1. Most airports you'd be landing on have dedicated emergency firefighters already on site who are extensively trained for exactly this sort of an event, so they'll be on top of your plane within minutes of touchdown.

2. The runway is appropriately large, with enough clearance in all three dimensions to accommodate malfunctioning aircraft.

3. In an emergency, you want to normalize the situation as much as possible, so that the only non-normal factor is the one you're dealing with — here it's the lack of gear. It's much easier to do a normal landing and deal with one issue than to do a completely abnormal landing.

4. Concerns like fuel economy or material damage are nice-to-have luxuries that we can afford during normal operations. The second anything non-normal happens, the one and only concern is saving lives. I assure you the pilot of this plane was exclusively focused on getting his passengers safely on the ground.