Flight Training - January/February 2025 - 43

A LIGHT TOUCH
Airplanes have to be landed with a reasonable amount of
care. They are lightly constructed, yet they travel at high
speed as they come down onto a hard runway surface. There
is a limit to how much of this abuse they can withstand,
hence pilots need to be aware of their constraints to avoid
the embarrassment and expense resulting from poor landing
technique. I always stress the three elements of a perfect
landing: get as low as you can; get as slow as you can; get the
wheels to roll straight down the runway. Both the amount and
direction of the airplane's kinetic energy require management
to finish a flight with buttery smoothness.
Consider three examples. If the airplane is leveled off too
high during the flare, there will be ample opportunity for it to
develop a sink rate as speed decays. Unless arrested, that creates
the dreaded " dropped in " touchdown, firmly felt even though
the movement of the tires is straight and speed is relatively slow.
On the other hand, the roundout can be executed perfectly, but if
the holding-off portion of the landing isn't continued, a nose-low
touchdown at needlessly high speed will put excessive energy
into the landing gear, again causing noticeable shock. Most of the
time, we aren't looking for a full-stall taildragger-style touchdown,
but we do need to milk as much speed as possible out of the equation
to soften the blow.
Which leaves us with the third ingredient, having the tires
aligned with the pavement streaking by underneath. There are two
ways to screw this up: to touch down crooked, or to be drifting sideways
at touchdown. In the opening example, Becky put the airplane
down in a misaligned state, unconsciously arriving with the same
crabbing correction she had used while coming down final. That's
how we land the old Ercoupes in a crosswind; just let it hit and allow
the trailing link landing gear to straighten things out.
Ercoupes, you see, were built without independent rudder
control to avoid any possibility of putting the airplane into a spin,
even if you managed to overcome the stall-limiting feature of the
elevators. Ercoupe pilots still have to get the first two elements of
the landing right, leveling off just above the runway and reducing
airspeed to the minimum. With rudder control, though, we can
precisely align the wheels with the concrete-if we learn to use
our feet properly. Had Becky applied right rudder to remove the
crab before touchdown, the airplane would have rolled onto the
pavement smoothly.
Here's the problem: The FAA's airplane certification rules
approach speed was correct, the touchdown could
have been delayed a bit longer. However, like a lot
of pilots with more experience, she had ignored the
few knots of crosswind component, and it was her
misaligned arrival, rather than excessive speed, that
contributed most of the shock to her ego. I would
have preferred to have gone right back out and let
her work on her landings, but I could tell this wasn't
the time. Worn down by the hours we had already
flown, she wouldn't have benefited from more flying
and would have likely become frustrated. So, I
opted to talk her through a postflight briefing while
the episode was fresh in her mind.
require a certain amount of yaw/roll coupling, so if you step on the
rudder pedal the opposite wing is going to rise, inducing a sideways
movement across the runway even though you've gotten the wheels
straight. That jerk you feel at the following touchdown isn't due to
drift from a crosswind, but from the raised wing. Naturally, if any
crosswind is present, having the upwind wing up is exactly the wrong
way to correct it. The solution is to anticipate this wing-raising effect
of applying rudder and simultaneously roll in a little opposite aileron to
keep it from happening.
Thus, if the tires contact the runway while moving in the same direction
as the centerline, the landing will be as smooth as silk, so long as sink
rate is zero and speed is minimized. And, sure enough, when Becky applied
what we discussed in her next session of landings, she was pleased with
the results. We learn by making mistakes and then fixing what was wrong
during the next attempt. FT
LeRoy Cook is an airline transport pilot and CFI.
FLIGHT TRAINING JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025
43
Flight Training - January/February 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Flight Training - January/February 2025
