“There are three secrets to making perfect landings. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”
Anyone who’s ever been a student pilot—much less tried to teach one—won’t be too surprised to learn that two-thirds of all accidents involving fixed-wing student solos happen during landing attempts. The good news is that less than 2 percent of them cause any serious injuries. Still, aircraft damage results in lost training time for other students and lost income for their instructors, and if not corrected quickly, damaged self-confidence can result in students being lost to aviation altogether—never mind the damage that increased claims and insurance premiums do to the whole industry.
Clearly, student crack-ups don’t serve anyone’s best interests, and no CFI would sign off a student whose recent landings hadn’t been on a solid winning streak. Still, every instructor who’s ever given a solo endorsement knows that it’s a calculated risk. Is there information out there that can help make that calculation more precise?
Data on just how landings go wrong might be a start. While students worry about learning to time the flare—and with good reason—their most common problem isn’t going up and down, but side to side. Losses of directional control made up 45 percent of all student landing accidents over the past 10 years, and less than half of these were specifically blamed on gusts or crosswinds. Learning to steer the airplane precisely, and keep steering it until it stops, cuts the risk of a landing accident by almost half. Lost directional control also caused more than 60 percent of solo takeoff accidents, second only to landings among the ways that students came to grief.
In the vertical axis, flaring early causes trouble twice as often as flaring late. Almost a third of the past decade’s landing accidents were stalls, while hard landings not involving stalls accounted for 15 percent. Long and short landings were almost equally rare, making up barely 2 percent of the total—slightly less than the number blamed on wet, soft, or contaminated runways.
And we shouldn’t be too hard on students. Bad landings made up 30 percent of the accidents sustained by private pilots, who typically spend a lot less time in the pattern. Pilots carry the skills developed—or neglected—as students throughout their flying careers.
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