I have a dream. I want to be good enough to be cocky. You know the type: Always boasting of their aviation prowess, overly impressed with their superior piloting skills, and generally a pain to be around. A pilot you love to hate. However, based on recent cockpit performance, I’ll hang with the humble for some time to come.
The scene opens in the cozy interior of a Piper Twin Comanche. That’s me in the left seat, back rigid and canted forward slightly, concentration fixed on the runway looming in the windshield. I’m about to land, and the way things have been going, I can’t predict the outcome.
Crossing the threshold, all of the ingredients are in place for a happy ending. The green Gear Down light is glowing, and the convex mirror stuck to the inboard side of the left engine cowl shows the nose gear extended. A glance out the side window confirms flaps down. Pitch trim—lots of nose up, which is where it likes to be on landing. Power—12 inches of manifold pressure. Airspeed—on the money. VASI—red over white. Centerline—straddling it, and tracking straight. Nothing to do but land.
Ease the throttle levers back to Idle, apply gentle back-pressure on the yoke to round out the descent, wait for the speed to bleed off, back-pressure, wait, back-pressure, wait, a bit more back-pressure, wait…there’s the washboard-like airframe shudder signaling a stall—BANG! Dang! Dropped it in again.
I’m in a landing slump. I’m not being hard on myself, either. There are witnesses. When I asked an instructor for a critique after flying with him, he responded with the tactful observation, "Well, at least you’re aware of your few weaknesses, like, uh, your landings." Thanks, pal.
But hey, I have an excuse. We recently installed wing-root fairings that smooth the airflow over the stabilator at landing speed and configuration. The wing-root fairings solve one of the Twin Comanche’s inherent shortcomings: difficulty in establishing and holding a nose-high attitude for touchdown. It’s a nose-heavy airplane, and in stock form interference drag from the wing root limits pitch authority at low speed. Factor in substantial ground effect due to the stubby landing gear, and sharp stall characteristics from the laminar flow airfoil, and you get a relatively high degree of landing difficulty for a tricycle-gear design.
Twin Comanche owners compensate by installing a smaller-diameter nosewheel to gain a slight nose-high advantage on touchdown. A second trick is to load 100 pounds of lead, tools, parts, or other objects in the baggage hold to coax the center of gravity rearward—and the nose skyward on landing. We have the small nosewheel, but fixing the aerodynamic problem involving the stabilator sounded like a more elegant solution than carrying around dead weight.
I can report that the wing-root fairings work as advertised. If it was difficult to raise the nose on landing before, now it’s almost too responsive. The addition of wing-root fairings has changed the airplane’s behavior. It likes to be treated differently on landing, but I’m coming up with the wrong responses to this new personality.
Slumps happen. Just ask a baseball slugger. A set of skills can take a temporary leave of absence, and who knows why? The way you work out of a slump is to concentrate on the mechanics, analyze what you may be doing wrong, and make the appropriate adjustments in technique. With practice, the most important factor in superior performance—confidence—should return, and the slump dissipates.
The problem with a landing slump is the analysis. The part that happens between the roundout and the touchdown is difficult to describe in terms of precise technique. I’ve been reviewing various training texts to see what the experts recommend in that phase of flight, and the word feel is used a lot. I don’t know how to describe it any better myself.
Assuming that I’ve flown a proper final approach and the airplane is configured correctly, landing is largely a matter of seat-of-the-pants feel for finding the sweet spot where height above the runway, speed, and nose attitude mesh perfectly to produce a gentle main-wheels-first touchdown. For reasons that have something to do with the change in the airplane’s low-and-slow handling characteristics, and something else that I haven’t been able to define, I’m not feeling my airplane very well in the roundout-to-touchdown phase of the landing sequence.
Overcoming a landing slump is a long, lonely business. Pilots can be taught how to trim, how to hold altitude, and how to make 45-degree banked turns, but how do you teach the finer points of feel? The cure for me can be stated in three words: practice, practice, practice. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had four separate sessions of touch-and-go landings in a variety of conditions—day, late at night, and in crosswinds. I’ve experimented with different flap settings and final approach airspeeds, and sought the advice of an instructor. The results, according to my honor system of grading, have been inconsistent, but not inconclusive. I’ve identified one root of the problem—not looking far enough down the runway to judge my height properly.
So that’s the objective of my next set of practice sessions. I haven’t logged so many touch and goes since I learned to fly, and there are more to come. The only way to work out of a slump is to keep swinging the bat.
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