Making consistently great landings is something of an art form. Landing is the pilot’s opportunity to shine, our ability to show our skills as an airman in a way that even first-time passengers understand. Make great landings and many earlier minor transgressions are forgotten. Screw it up and prepare to be judged.
Entire books have been written about how to land properly, and many students find it a frustrating task and a common learning plateau in the flight-training process. That’s because landings one of the first tests of correlative learning. They combine all elements of speed control, descent, attitude transition, and configuration changes like nothing else in the primary training curriculum. But it doesn’t have to be hard. The secrets are actually quite easy to understand. Stay on speed and glidepath and you will be set up in a perfect position, mere inches off the ground, where your success is all but assured.
When you first start learning how to land, it seems as though the touchdown—the last few seconds of the flight, when your wheels are just about to make contact with the ground—is the hardest part. Actually, that’s the magic spot where all we do is wait. The real work starts much earlier in the process.
You’ve heard of the accident chain, the theory that minor mistakes snowball to the point where either person or property suffers. The concept of a chain of events isn’t limited to accidents. Each phase of flight has building blocks that, if done well, lead to a good result. But a slip-up or two along the way can bring our good result into question.
Have you had trips around the pattern when someone cut you off, you had to extend your downwind leg, or you set up too wide and the resulting landing didn’t go well? Sure, you sometimes get lucky, but it’s a safe bet that the landing wasn’t your best effort. It’s critical to focus on getting into the proper position on downwind.
Abeam the touchdown point is a great time to “reset” the pattern and transition to the landing sequence. Regardless of what happened from takeoff to that point, take a deep breath, forget about it, and focus from that spot forward on how it relates to the landing. For this reason, practicing your first landings at a very sleepy airport without a control tower is a good idea. Remove distractions and challenges, and you’ll have a better opportunity to cement proper behavior early in your learning.
The approach. Each instructor has a different way of teaching his preferred combination of power, flaps, speed, and position on the approach. There are many ways to get from abeam the touchdown point to terra firma, but a common method is to set power to 1,500 rpm, add one notch of flaps, and start down at around 500 feet per minute. If flying a carbureted airplane, carb heat on will come first, and in Cessnas, usually a quick spin or two of nose-up trim will help the process.
The goal is to arrive on final approach three-quarters of a mile to a mile from the touchdown point at or slightly faster than 1.3 VSO and around 400 feet above the ground. At this position, you should be able to add full flaps and change nothing else until power is brought to idle sometime during the roundout or flare.
Of course, this is all much easier said than done. Between sitting abeam the touchdown point at pattern altitude and arriving at the roundout, you will have made configuration changes, turned twice, descended, and probably made a few radio calls. To help get all this straight in your mind, draw the approach on a big piece of paper and label all the steps you must take along the way. Then sit at home and visualize yourself doing each one. This works to reinforce what are, in the beginning, very defined, mechanical actions.
The difficulty with all this is determining when you must make adjustments. For example, if you let the nose come down in the turn from downwind to base and the airplane starts speeding up and you are descending at 700 feet per minute, you’ll never be where you want on final approach. Do you pull back power only? Maybe you only raise the nose, or perhaps you add more flaps? The correct answer depends on the exact situation, but for many pilots it's easy to think in terms of pitch controlling airspeed and power controlling altitude (see “The Great Debate,” page 29). So, raise the nose to see if that gets you back on speed and altitude. If not, a power adjustment might be necessary.
The roundout. The transition from the descent of the approach to the (initially) level attitude of the landing is often the point where things go very wrong. That’s because any deviation in speed is magnified in this simple pitch change. Experienced pilots can fly 10 knots above approach speed and transition smoothly to a nice flare, but most beginners can’t. Excess speed manifests itself as ballooning, where the airplane feels like it’s caught in a high-rise elevator as it shoots high up above the runway.
Ballooning can be dangerous for the airplane. Typically you’ll arrive at the penthouse floor with very little speed, too high above the runway for a nice landing. Some people will correct halfway up by applying down elevator. That can smash the nose gear into the ground, which is not a pleasant way to end the flight. Others will hold on for the ride. As energy is dissipated (remember, we don’t have power at this point), the bottom drops out and we stall, arriving hard on the runway. This is where we see crumpled wings, broken landing gear, and other unfortunate results. So other than getting to the roundout at the right speed, and thus avoiding ballooning altogether, the best remedy is to go around and try again. Especially when you’re first learning, there’s no reason to try and save the landing here. It reinforces bad habits.
If you’re able to make a nice roundout from a too-fast airspeed, you will float, which means that you’ll be in a level or slightly nose-high attitude, waiting for airspeed to dissipate as you cruise down the runway. Floating eats up runway quickly. It’s also bad form. So either go around or practice landings at a space shuttle landing strip.
Being too slow on final approach has consequences as well. Usually it means a somewhat hard landing, as the little bit of available energy is scrubbed off quickly in the roundout. In extreme cases it can mean landing short. Knowing this, a common reaction early in the flight training process is to fly too fast.
One of the reasons the roundout is so challenging is because many airplanes allow for a fairly steep descent angle with full flaps. That means the transition from descent to level flight can be a big pitch change, which is hard to do with finesse. An easier way to go from descent to flare is by trying no-flap landings. Without flaps, the sight picture on the approach is much more shallow, and the transition much less abrupt. It’s not an ideal way to initially practice landings, but it can be a nice way to take the difficulty of the stark contrast of full-flap transitions out of the equation.
The landing. You’ve made it through the approach and roundout and now you’re ready to bring the flight to a close. This is the point where we get rid of the rest of the energy and touch down softly in a full stall with the nosewheel off the ground. If you’ve done everything right up to this point, this will be easy. Gradually bring the yoke or stick back to transition from a level flight attitude to one that is nose-high. If you judged the roundout height correctly, the wheels will be a few inches above the ground, and they will gently touch as the wings stall. Power-off stalls that you practiced will feel almost exactly the same.
If you’re on speed and at an appropriate height above the ground, the time from roundout to touchdown should be no more than a few seconds. If you’re too fast, you will float and that time will be extended. Too slow and you’ll clunk down quickly after the roundout, if not during. Arrive right on speed and there won’t be too much excess energy to make the airplane float or balloon, meaning that even a somewhat ham-fisted flare will bring acceptable and safe results.
Where to look is a common question, and all instructors think they have the right answer. Looking a few runway stripes ahead of the airplane is common, and usually works. But the best thing to do is take a mental snapshot of the takeoff. Focus on that fleeting second when the wheels just leave the ground, and you will know exactly what it should look like outside your window on landing as well.
It may seem like those last few inches of altitude are the hardest part of the landing, but they are easy if you’ve prepared yourself properly. As you gain more experience, you can flub the approach and still make a good landing—but make sure to build good habits. Don’t fret if you are having trouble. Once you analyze each portion of the process you’ll realize that the last six inches reach up a thousand feet, into the traffic pattern.
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