As you probably recall from your own struggles in training, learning to land the aircraft doesn’t always come easily. A trainer endures more than its share of flat touchdowns, stalled drop-ins, bounced landings—and their evil relative, porpoising—while students struggle to acquire proficiency.
Also, awkwardly performed ground operations, such as harsh braking or side loads imposed on landing gear when directional control is lost, or when the trainer is landed still crabbed into a crosswind, offer still more examples of how your trainer’s structural components are put to the most severe kinds of tests.
A hard landing can damage an aircraft in multiple ways, but the aircraft may still end up back out on the flight line, awaiting the next renter.
On February 3, 2014, both insult and injury were inflicted on a trainer in Fort Pierce, Florida, when a student pilot performing touch-and-go landings on a first solo in a Cessna 172 flared high on the third landing, touched down hard, and bounced.
“He then pitched the nose of the airplane up and the tail section struck the runway prior to landing,” said a National Transportation Safety Board accident summary.
The student pilot taxied off the runway and stopped. “A visual examination revealed minor damage to the exterior of the airplane,” continued the NTSB report. However, “The airplane was examined by maintenance personnel for further damage and released back into service.” It was another pilot using the aircraft on a subsequent flight who found that the flight controls were “difficult to manipulate,” the NTSB report said.
“The airplane was returned for further examination and during the second examination, substantial damage was noted to the firewall from the first event.”
It’s worth noting that touch-and-go landings are not universally prescribed for a first solo—it is an event that demands enough of a student pilot that some instructors consider full-stop landings, exiting the runway, and taxiing back for another circuit to be a preferred, less hectic formula.
If undetected damage that evades visual inspection is a hazard for the next pilot scheduled to fly an aircraft, consider the possible consequences of damage never examined because it resulted from a mishap that went unreported. When the right main gear of a Piper PA-28-181 collapsed on rollout after an “uneventful” instructional flight landed in gusty winds on April 7, 2013, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, bolt fatigue, wear, and looseness came in for scrutiny and analysis.
“According to a representative from the airplane manufacturer, he had seen similar events in the past and such wear usually involved airplanes used for student pilot training,” said the NTSB’s accident summary. “The airplanes would suffer an initiating hard landing that was not reported by the student pilot. The damage could then propagate over time, but it was difficult to tell if the initiating hard landing occurred months or years prior to the actual landing gear failure; however, it was also common practice for mechanics to check the bolts during annual and 100-hour inspections.”
The aircraft had flown about 51 hours in the three months since the most recent annual inspection, noted the NTSB, attributing the accident to the probable cause of “fatigue failure of the right main landing gear attach bolts due to an unreported hard landing at an unknown time, and subsequent collapse of the landing gear.”
When does a hard landing become hard enough—absent obvious damage—to warrant mention to someone back at the flight school? There’s no magic formula. Once a student pilot has moved up to exercising unsupervised solo privileges, or a renter-pilot has been handed the keys, there’s an implied presumption that such an incident is unlikely.
But accident reports still commonly involve “airplanes used for student pilot training,” so if you are going to fly one, give it an extra careful look before flying.
AROW: This acronym reminds you what must be on board the aircraft before takeoff—airworthiness certficate, registration, operating limits, and weight and balance calculations.
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