It’s no great secret that student pilots sometimes have trouble landing. So do the rest of us—bungled landings make up about a third of all fixed-wing GA accidents—but it’s a particular challenge for students. Over the past decade, more than 55 percent of all accidents during student solos were bad landings; the total was 20 percent higher than the number of landing accidents in all dual instruction combined, including commercial, multiengine, et cetera.
If you think about how much time your students spend flying solo compared to flying with you, it’s clear that the additional risk is substantial. But of course those first solo landings are perhaps the most essential step toward becoming a pilot.
What’s not as well known is that student landing accidents aren’t just more of the same. Student pilots actually seem to do better at putting the airplane between the arrival and departure thresholds. Short landings and overruns accounted for 13 percent of non-instructional landing accidents and 16 percent of those on dual flights. On student solos, they were barely 2 percent—on average, just one per year.
Losses of directional control are a problem across the board. Solo or dual, instructional or otherwise, about half of all landing accidents arise from pilots’ inability to keep an airplane tracking straight. The consequences range from excursions into the weeds to ground loops, gear collapses, and cartwheels. The percentage is actually a little lower among students, but that slightly smaller share of a much larger whole translates into significant excess risk of getting sidewise before slowing to taxi speed. The data suggest that one of the two best ways to reduce the chance of your students suffering embarrassment (or worse) while trying to kiss the pavement is to enforce rigorous standards of longitudinal alignment.
The other, of course, is fine-tuning the flare. The glaring difference between the way in which students and certificated pilots botch the return to Earth is that fully half of student prangs are hard landings or stalls. Among certificated pilots, that figure is 20 percent. Before either has become second nature, focusing on alignment makes it easy to flare too early or too late…while concentrating on the flare makes it harder to notice drift. Some simply can’t do two things at once—but can still learn to switch between them fast enough to make it work.
Commercial pilot David Jack Kenny had terrible trouble learning to time the flare.
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It’s no great secret that student pilots sometimes have trouble landing. So do the rest of us—bungled landings make up about a third of all fixed-wing GA accidents—but it’s a particular challenge for students. Over the past decade, more than 55 percent of all accidents during student solos were bad landings; the total was 20 percent higher than the number of landing accidents in all dual instruction combined, including commercial, multiengine, et cetera.
If you think about how much time your students spend flying solo compared to flying with you, it’s clear that the additional risk is substantial. But of course those first solo landings are perhaps the most essential step toward becoming a pilot.
What’s not as well known is that student landing accidents aren’t just more of the same. Student pilots actually seem to do better at putting the airplane between the arrival and departure thresholds. Short landings and overruns accounted for 13 percent of non-instructional landing accidents and 16 percent of those on dual flights. On student solos, they were barely 2 percent—on average, just one per year.
Losses of directional control are a problem across the board. Solo or dual, instructional or otherwise, about half of all landing accidents arise from pilots’ inability to keep an airplane tracking straight. The consequences range from excursions into the weeds to ground loops, gear collapses, and cartwheels. The percentage is actually a little lower among students, but that slightly smaller share of a much larger whole translates into significant excess risk of getting sidewise before slowing to taxi speed. The data suggest that one of the two best ways to reduce the chance of your students suffering embarrassment (or worse) while trying to kiss the pavement is to enforce rigorous standards of longitudinal alignment.
The other, of course, is fine-tuning the flare. The glaring difference between the way in which students and certificated pilots botch the return to Earth is that fully half of student prangs are hard landings or stalls. Among certificated pilots, that figure is 20 percent. Before either has become second nature, focusing on alignment makes it easy to flare too early or too late…while concentrating on the flare makes it harder to notice drift. Some simply can’t do two things at once—but can still learn to switch between them fast enough to make it work.
Commercial pilot David Jack Kenny had terrible trouble learning to time the flare.
Related Articles
It’s no great secret that student pilots sometimes have trouble landing. So do the rest of us—bungled landings make up about a third of all fixed-wing GA accidents—but it’s a particular challenge for students. Over the past decade, more than 55 percent of all accidents during student solos were bad landings; the total was 20 percent higher than the number of landing accidents in all dual instruction combined, including commercial, multiengine, et cetera.
If you think about how much time your students spend flying solo compared to flying with you, it’s clear that the additional risk is substantial. But of course those first solo landings are perhaps the most essential step toward becoming a pilot.
What’s not as well known is that student landing accidents aren’t just more of the same. Student pilots actually seem to do better at putting the airplane between the arrival and departure thresholds. Short landings and overruns accounted for 13 percent of non-instructional landing accidents and 16 percent of those on dual flights. On student solos, they were barely 2 percent—on average, just one per year.
Losses of directional control are a problem across the board. Solo or dual, instructional or otherwise, about half of all landing accidents arise from pilots’ inability to keep an airplane tracking straight. The consequences range from excursions into the weeds to ground loops, gear collapses, and cartwheels. The percentage is actually a little lower among students, but that slightly smaller share of a much larger whole translates into significant excess risk of getting sidewise before slowing to taxi speed. The data suggest that one of the two best ways to reduce the chance of your students suffering embarrassment (or worse) while trying to kiss the pavement is to enforce rigorous standards of longitudinal alignment.
The other, of course, is fine-tuning the flare. The glaring difference between the way in which students and certificated pilots botch the return to Earth is that fully half of student prangs are hard landings or stalls. Among certificated pilots, that figure is 20 percent. Before either has become second nature, focusing on alignment makes it easy to flare too early or too late…while concentrating on the flare makes it harder to notice drift. Some simply can’t do two things at once—but can still learn to switch between them fast enough to make it work.
Commercial pilot David Jack Kenny had terrible trouble learning to time the flare.
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