Mar. 1, 2013, issue of 'AOPA ePilot: Flight Training Edition' weekly newsletter
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| ‘Painting’ the stripe |
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Training Tips‘Painting’ the stripe
To you, it’s a frustrating mystery. There’s no crosswind—you know how to handle that—and you’re not overcontrolling, a problem that once spoiled some of your nicer efforts.
So what’s up?
In many cases, it’s a small problem that produces a disproportionately large result: When arriving in the touchdown zone and beginning the roundout, some pilots try to aim at the centerline over the middle of the aircraft’s nose—that is, the prop and spinner—instead of placing the white stripe directly beneath the pilot’s seat.
What’s wrong with that?
Unless you fly a tandem-seat aircraft, your seat is not directly above the trainer’s longitudinal axis. So instead of looking directly forward as you flare and touch down, you are sighting the centerline from the side. (A pilot in the left seat will tend to touch down left of the centerline; a pilot in the right seat will touch down right of the centerline.)
That’s a detail often overlooked in discussions of the sight picture a pilot should aim for during a landing approach, when you learned to look beyond your intended touchdown spot when judging descent rate and timing your flare because the view closer to the aircraft is blurred by the aircraft’s motion over the ground. Making the small adjustment required to touch down directly on the stripe will provide the finishing touch.
To clearly observe the effect of this minor sighting error on your landings, try this ground experiment: Seated in the left seat of your tied-down aircraft—or even in the driver’s seat of your car—look straight ahead at an object at a modest distance, say 20 feet away. Then change your line of sight to view an object over the center of the nose at a like distance. Note their separation. Now it’s easy to see how using the second aim point causes your touchdowns to become offset from the centerline.
Make the small adjustment in your sighting method on your next landing, and a vexing problem disappears!
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AVIATION EVENTS & WEATHER
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Your landing approach is going well, but long before you touch down a few feet to the left of the centerline, the flight instructor seated next to you knows what is going to happen.
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