Over the years I’ve adopted more than a few high-time presolo students who were unable to land an airplane. Sure, some could be categorized as slow learners. Most, however, were never allowed to land as the sole manipulator of the flight controls, because the flight instructor made all the landings. How is it possible for students to learn to land if they aren’t allowed to land on their own?
Teaching someone to land an airplane requires that the instructor let them land an airplane. Don’t get me wrong: If a student has little or no flight experience, then the instructor should keep his or her hands on or near the yoke as appropriate when landing. That’s just common sense (and survival). Ideally, the instructor should progressively surrender control responsibility as the student gains skill at the roundout and flare. Some instructors are reluctant to transfer this responsibility. They’re yoke hogs, and we need to understand what motivates this behavior.
Predictability. The lack of it is a big reason some instructors can’t keep their pinkies off the controls during landing. If instructors can’t anticipate how their students will respond as they approach the runway, they have no choice but to ride the controls all the way to touchdown. However, after the first three or four landing sorties, most students find their landing groove and no longer threaten to leave a big groove in the runway’s surface.
Student behavior now becomes progressively more predictable, and the instructor should transfer more control responsibility to the student. Eventually, the instructor’s hands no longer make contact with the flight controls. That said, these same hands remain nearby in the quick-draw position.
If we don’t let our students assume increasing responsibility for the landing, then we deprive them of the feedback necessary to develop their chops at landing. It’s a Catch-22. The more they practice landing as you manipulate the controls, the less progress they make—and the more likely you are to keep your hands on the controls.
Perhaps the biggest misconception instructors have about initial landing practice is that their hands should remain on the yoke if there’s any chance the student might over- or underflare the airplane. There’s nothing wrong with allowing students to make benign, non-lethal mistakes. That’s called feedback. What you want to prevent are lethal mistakes. That’s called proper supervision.
This is why you keep your hands in the quick-draw position during landing practice. You don’t keep them in your pockets. Neither do you let your hands hover inches above the controls, as if they’re hot gold bars waiting to be grabbed the moment they cool.
Allowing the student to overflare, underflare, and/or drift a little is essential to learning. Just don’t let that student hurt anyone or anything. We can’t possibly teach students to land properly if they aren’t allowed to see the outcome of their control inputs.
Confidence.The lack of it is another reason instructors often are unwilling to take their hands off the controls during student landings. This is why instructors who train instructor applicants should show them how to anticipate and recover from errant student actions during landing. If you weren’t fortunate enough to receive this training, you need to get it.
Begin by finding the most experienced flight instructor on the field. Unfortunately, using a conch shell or special bird calls to attract these individuals doesn’t work very often (and when it does, it’s hard to explain). So a little gumshoe work is necessary to find an instructor of this caliber. You want someone experienced who’s seen many of the strange things students do.
Once found, arrange a flight on which this instructor simulates the typical errant landing behaviors students are known to make: overflare, underflare, failure to apply crosswind correction, and so on. One hour of practice with an experienced instructor is usually all it takes to make you more confident when teaching landings.
Teaching landings properly means letting a student land an airplane. For you, that might mean learning to let go of the flight controls when it’s appropriate to do so. The ultimately payoff is gold-medal confidence for your students—no third-place bronze medal for anyone that you train.
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