The Student Experience: Presolo

The quest for consistent landings

The sun was dipping slowly beyond the horizon as I turned downwind for the fifty-eighth landing of my short flying career. At the midfield point, I radioed the tower asking for a full stop, which was promptly granted. Abeam the numbers the mental checklist went into action: carb heat on, throttle back to 1,700 rpm, 10 degrees of flaps, 80 kt indicated airspeed, check the mixture and fuel selector. Everything looked good.

"Niner-Four-Four, can you make this a short approach? You have a Citation on a five-mile final," the controller asked.

"Sure, making short approach, Niner-Four-Four."

This would have been just another landing if it weren't for the fact that the right seat was empty for the very first time in my 20 hours of flying.

What possessed me to accept the challenge of a short approach during my first solo escapes me. So does the reason for my complete lack of hesitation in doing so, considering I'd only practiced the procedure once before. Great instruction and confidence building, most likely.

I'd expected my first solo landing to be the most challenging and nerve-wracking I'd ever have to perform, and most likely the worst because I'd have to handle the entire workload completely on my own. My instructor would not be there to work the radio, help me to spot traffic, or catch any mistakes.

But in spite of the last-minute short approach it surprisingly turned into a squeaker.

Landings had always impressed me and continue to do so. There is nothing more beautiful than seeing a jet come in to land, crabbed into the wind, and straighten itself out as it majestically returns to earth.

As a teenager with a serious itch to fly, I'd often wandered over to my local airfield to watch the airplanes land in a perfectly orchestrated aerial ballet. Seeing aircraft big and small fly in orderly fashion around the pattern, line up neatly on final with landing lights glistening in the sky, and touch down with perfect elegance was always a great thrill. Those guys sure made it look easy.

But over the past 20 hours, I had learned that taking a still-somewhat-unfamiliar flying machine smoothly back to earth is in fact a daunting task. Early on I touched down hard, bounced, landed long, sideways: You name it, I did it. The procedures were safely engraved in my brain and I could recite them in my sleep, but I'd forgotten that landings are in fact all about feel and visualizing that perfect sight picture. When to begin the roundout? When to flare? How long to hold that back-pressure in ground effect? When to pull back to stall the airplane just inches above the ground?

Those intricate ingredients of the greaser could only be learned by doing it and more importantly "seeing" it.

A handful of hours into my training, Tyler -- my flight instructor -- took me up to practice touch and goes for what turned out to be one of the most instructive lessons so far.

We took off from Runway 29 at Bedford, Massachusetts' Hanscom Field, a long and smooth 7,000-foot strip that would afford me a comfortable overshoot margin. Tyler handled most of the radio work, while I focused on myriad elements of the approach and landing to try and put the airplane down in one piece.

The approaches were fine. But all the hard work consistently unravelled as I got over the numbers: I flared too high or too low, flew in too fast and consequently floated for ages, or let the nose dip too much while in ground effect only to jerk the wheel back so much that the airplane would bounce and soar several feet above the runway and meet the pavement with resounding force.

Sadly, I performed all this with perfect consistency.

Under Tyler's patient supervision I committed every mistake one could make on landing except for flying the airplane into the ground, and I must have accomplished several of the least graceful touchdowns in the history of aviation.

But eight terribly botched landings later I felt like I'd learned a lot and was burning for another chance to put the airplane down smoothly.

A week later, we gave it another try. Previous errors still freshly etched in my mind, we took off and landed 10 times. As if by sheer magic, things just came together. All it took was that humbling flight to show me the consequences of my errors, a debrief with Tyler, and a week spent replaying the clumsy touchdowns in my head.

The first landing was a little rough, but acceptable and certainly far better than anything I'd done so far. I was finally seeing what a landing should look like.

Second time around, I wiggled my toes on final to relax, as someone had advised on a pilot Web message board; pulled the throttle when I had the pavement made; looked all the way down the runway, trying hard not to use the cowling as a reference to center myself; leveled at 60 kt into ground effect; held that back-pressure; then smoothly applied more as the airplane gently began to sink. Inches off the runway the stall horn sounded, and the wheels squeaked as they kissed the tarmac.

I was ecstatic.

In typical fashion, however, flying showed me just how little I really knew.

While on long final after a much-extended downwind during my second supervised solo the following day, an airplane slotted to follow me began its base turn early and cut me off. Luckily I'd spotted it before anything was said on the radio and slowed down, only to be asked by the controller seconds later if I could hold short of the intersecting runway after landing for an inbound jet. I'd never been in that situation with my instructor before. I knew I could stop the airplane well clear of Runway 5, but I decided to err on the side of safety and replied "unable," prompting a go-around.

Then came crosswind landings, which worried me the most because I had no experience with them.

These require a particular set of skills to compensate for the drift caused by the wind when it blows at an angle from the runway, thereby pushing the aircraft away from the centerline. The greater the angle between the strip and the wind, the greater the control inputs to correct for the drift will have to be.

I believed I completely lacked the precision and feel necessary to carry out such landings successfully and became frustrated every time I cancelled a solo flight because the wind made me uncomfortable. That concern haunted me until the very day of my checkride. As chance would have it, the day I took my practical test was breezy, and I had to contend with relatively strong crosswinds. I had thought so far that while I knew how to land an airplane in adverse wind conditions in theory, I couldn't do it in practice. However, the breeze failed to foil my plans to become a pilot.

Yet, the fear of crosswinds persisted. A few days after having earned my private pilot certificate, I turned up at the airport only to find out that the wind -- which was blowing at almost 90 degrees to the active runway with gusts up to 30 kt -- was well beyond my personal limits and anything I'd ever experienced.

Deciding this could be the chance to tackle my apprehension once and for all, I asked an instructor to ride with me and we set off for a few touch and goes. "What's the greatest crosswind you've ever landed in?" I asked him, as we taxied out. "I'd say this is pretty much it," he replied. "I'm not going to lie to you, though; you've got your work cut out for you."

The thought was a little unsettling, but I felt that if I could pull this off, I would be a better and more confident pilot for it. Plus, it would be fun.

The demonstrated crosswind component for the airplane we were flying, or the amount of wind in which a test pilot landed the airplane, was 15 kt. The crosswinds we'd be contending with today were higher than that.

I was so focused on my concern about landing in a crosswind that I forgot how tricky takeoffs could be in gusty conditions. Seconds after lifting off, low-level wind shear caused the airplane's left wing to dip quite dramatically.

All around the pattern I decried my poor skills at ground reference maneuvers, which are designed to teach students how to compensate for the wind once aloft, in order to maintain a steady course over the ground. We were being thrown around like a cork on heavy seas, and as I turned on final, I found myself flying with the nose at almost a 45-degree angle to the runway just to stay lined up with the extended centerline.

Over the numbers, I retarded the throttle and kicked out the crab -- the wind correction I'd used on final approach -- and applied right rudder to line up the nose with the runway's centerline. Once straightened out, I added opposite aileron to keep the airplane from drifting right of the centerline, and we found ourselves in the normal wing-low attitude for a crosswind landing on one wheel. While I knew this was nothing unusual, it still looked strange and felt uncomfortable.

The final moments over the runway took constant correction to handle the gusts that were wreaking havoc with the stabilized approach I'd tried to make. I knew I had to touch down on the upwind main wheel first, but I didn't think I could do it. A split second before touching down, I took out the corrections and landed the airplane quite hard with some side load, as it had weathervaned slightly into the wind when I released the slip. I immediately added some right rudder and added sufficient aileron to keep the airplane on the tarmac. Full power, flaps up, carb heat in, and we were off again. We weren't hurt, but my ego was bruised by a very ungracious landing.

The second attempt was far more successful. Shamed by my previous performance, I kept the corrections in all the way to the runway and managed to touch down on one wheel, as required. The instructor seemed pleased, and so was I. We did three more before the wind gusts began to exceed 30 kt.

"We're pushing the limits," he said as we took off for our last time around the pattern. The final landing of the day was on the upwind wheel and on the centerline. I opened the throttle a little on the rollout to allow more air to travel over the wing surfaces and therefore increase their efficiency in an attempt to defeat the wind's stubborn attempts to put us in the grass.

I'd done it. I'd conquered the mighty crosswinds in far worse conditions than I would ever allow myself to fly, and that was good enough to boost my confidence. While keeping my limits within reason since I am a low-time pilot, I walked away with the exhilarating feeling that if need be, I could do it again and live.

Landings once had just been the beautiful and thrilling end to a flight. They now represent the beginning of the pilot's introspection: a different challenge every time and a constant learning experience.

Mark Wilkinson was a Boston journalist when he learned to fly in 2004. He enjoyed flying so much that he decided to pursue a flying career.