Why is it that putting an airplane exactly where we want it can be so difficult—or at least seems incredibly difficult? That’s easy to answer: The approach to the landing and the landing itself embody every aspect of every one of our flying skills. Almost everything we know about flying is compressed into that single two- or three-minute period of time. During the entire maneuver, we’re dealing with a variety of speeds, control configurations, and altitudes—all of which can be complicated by Mother Nature. Yet, we are expected to fly out of the air to alight on a given spot, or close to it. To land with precision in every landing seems difficult—because it is difficult.
Why should we try for precision touchdowns? Flying should be a never-ending quest for improvement. For that reason, and because every successful flight ends in a landing, we should look at each touchdown as a way to measure and improve our skill.
The landing is just about the only time when we can empirically measure how good we are. When we’re in cruise, we don’t know for a fact that we’re holding an exact altitude, or that our navigation took us precisely over our checkpoint. In the air, everything is a three-dimensional approximation because we have nothing to measure ourselves against. Between the centerline, the runway surface, and runway lights, however, nothing about a touchdown is approximate.
“Precision” is open to definition. The word precision is a relative term. To a pilot in a Super Cub sneaking over the trees into a 600-foot strip, precision means landing on a specific blade of grass right on the threshold. To those less concerned with being the ultimate controller of their fate, precision means just getting down somewhere in the first half of a 5,000-foot runway.
Although the application of precision often is determined by the runway (really short fields discourage sloppy flying), for the best pilots, precision is simply a mindset. They put it on the numbers regardless of the length of the runway. Many others, however, just want to get it down safely—exactly where isn’t of much concern to them.
Which factors defeat precise touchdowns? It often has been said that the landing is made in the approach—and that’s the gospel truth. If imprecision is allowed to creep in during any phase of the approach, it’s almost guaranteed to come back to haunt you as the approach progresses.
Because everything we know about flying is laminated together in the approach, when any parameter is allowed to get out of limits, it greatly affects the rest. For that reason precision isn’t totally defeated, or fully supported, by a single factor. They are knitted together into a tightly woven fabric in which each factor (airspeed, glidepath, ground track, et cetera) has the potential to unravel the whole venture.
Not having a touchdown point guarantees imprecision. If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there? A runway is not a destination—it’s too big. Our real destination is an identifiable, specific piece of that runway. Maybe it’s a bare spot in the grass 200 feet down, or opposite the second runway light. It doesn’t make any difference what it is, as long as you can clearly identify it and use it as the point on which you’re going to touch down. You must pick out that point, and you have to become religious about focusing on it.
It’s one thing to be looking at the runway, and it is something else entirely to pick out one specific point—whether a discoloration in the pavement or a tuft of grass—and visually fixate on it. That one point becomes the focus of all the other pilot stuff that you’re doing to fly the airplane. And that requires a determined effort at scanning all the elements involved.
Scan is the most important factor. To a nonpilot, the blizzard of information and things that a pilot must control on an approach appears overwhelming. And at the beginning, each of us had that feeling. Then we got better at isolating bits of information and digesting them. Over time, less concentration is required to scan every factor while simultaneously keeping that touchdown point the center of our focus.
The scan requires a constant movement of our eyes in which they continuously rotate through the windshield and across the panel. On each pass, they relay new information to our brain to be evaluated.
Speed control is king; float is the enemy. The precision with which the airspeed is controlled on approach directly affects the precision of the touchdown. If the speed is moving around, or is stable at a higher or lower number than is appropriate, there is absolutely no way a pilot is going to be able to predict or control either the point of touchdown or the grace with which the maneuver is executed.
If an airplane comes over the fence measurably slower than the approach speed in the pilot’s operating handbook, the float during flare will be greatly reduced and the flare technique more critical. Slow enough and there will be no float at all—and the landing could be rather abrupt. Come in fast, and it’ll float down the runway, challenging you to raise up the nose enough to bleed off speed without ballooning. We want neither.
Controlling the speed actually means controlling the nose. This is a good thing because at the same time you’re looking over the nose and trying to control the attitude, you’ll also be seeing your touchdown point.
When we say control the nose, we’re talking about holding the speed as precisely as possible. Five mph either way has disproportionate consequences—that’s too sloppy. If the POH says 84 mph, it means 84, as exactly as you can muster.
Incidentally, one technique that some use to control float is to gradually slow the airplane very slightly before the flare, which will accelerate the speed bleed-off during the flare. This is, however, something better left to more experienced pilots. It’s easy to misjudge and be so slow that the aircraft comes down like a manhole cover.
Glidepath control: a constant goal. Flying an approach with power greatly simplifies a precise touchdown because it adds an element of control. If we’re flying an approach without power, we want to make sure our glidepath is going to take us where we want to go. That starts on downwind, where we look at the wind and try to determine where to turn base. While doing this, remember that a pilot can get an airplane down by utilizing much more than just gravity. We can time the flap extensions to increase rate of descent at the appropriate time, as well as use a slip to fine-tune the descent rate.
When setting up our glidepath, we want to remember that we’ll have 500 feet of float—plus or minus—at the bottom when we flare. More, if we’re not exactly on speed or the wind is different than we expected. So, the old “your reference point moves up the windshield if you’re low, and down if you’re high” still works, although it has to be slightly modified. The reference point in this kind of glidepath control isn’t where you’ll touch down because of the float. So, we have to pick a reference point that’s slightly short of our desired touchdown point.
If we’re flying into a short field, chances are we’ll be using power in the approach, and we’ll be slowing prematurely to make the airplane more power-dependent at the end of final, so the glidepath more closely follows the throttle. In that situation, the reference point in the windshield is the touchdown point. On short final the speed is reduced to a predetermined small-but-safe margin above stall speed, and we modulate the power to take us directly to our touchdown point. As the nose comes up, the power is bled back to let us down.
How do we judge “good”? The goal is to gently set the airplane on the main gear, right where we want it, while holding the nose off the ground until it’s ready to come down. That’s hard to do in a Cessna with full flaps, because the nose wants to come down immediately. With less flap or in other airplanes, however, it’s not only relatively easy to do—but every time you do it, you feel like a real aviator. That alone is worth the effort.
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