I wanted to post this as it’s all over the local news. I (Scott) had to make a belly landing in the Aerostar today with my son Jake as co-pilot. Let me say Jake was a complete pro and a huge boon to us getting down safely. Well, we had a very strange issue to deal with not found in the emergency section of the manual. We had a hydraulic system issue in the air, that appeared to be a hydraulic leak, and we could not get the left main gear to drop and lock. We had just the nose gear and right main gear locking down. My concern was fire (a low left wing full of fuel scraping in the runway), meaning landing with a nose and right gear extended dragging the left wing with fuel on the runway which could result in a fireball landing. We ended up raising the gear and doing a belly landing. The Aerostar was a rock and could, IMO, land on its belly 50 times. As we were scraping down the runway I was thinking “This sounds just like our B-17 belly landing.” We are safe with minimal damage to the belly but the props did touch the ground when we touched down (were feathered) which means the engines have to be torn down. Life is full of experiences and my hope is we can salvage this beautiful plane. Thank you to all of the incredible professionals who came to our help. I feel both unworthy and grateful for the incredible professionalism from our first responders. Thank you to the fire chief and everyone who worked so hard to keep us safe and recover our beautiful Aerostar. Happy new year everyone. Scott