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Towner

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  • 5 weeks later...

One way to make consistently nice smooth landings and especially in winds.

Try leaving 2600 - 2800 rpm power in right to touchdown. This reduces the vertical decent rate a bit and gives you really good control over the tail because of the prop wash. So what if you go an extra 75 - 100 ft. The idea here is to save the plane not your ego. It is less stress on the plane with nice smooth landings. This works very well in high crosswinds to control the tail. Do not pump the stick learn to hold it still and steady and only slightly pull back as you near the touchdown. I see so many over manipulating the stick. I learned to get away from this flying helicopters. You need a steady hand for them. The stick controls the speed so you will have the stick back just slightly more than with an idle landing, but you will land at the same speed as you do at idle, but with more control and slower vertical decent. Learning this method is easy and you can make good landings all the time. This works in any flap settings. There is nothing that says you must always land at idle. Just an old out dated tradition. Jets and larger aircraft land this way all the time. I hard a slightly hard landing when I first got my CT, but never again in 2K hours. I teach this method with all high time pilots and new pilots. It really helps people from dropping the CT in.

You actually practiced this with power on stalls in flight. You may have had something like 4K+ rpm in at altitude and pulled the stick back to decrease your speed until you hit stall speed. The stick controls the speed and not the throttle.

 

p.s.

I'm not telling anyone not to learn idle only any flap landings just don't be narrow minded and think that's the only way to land. Too many CFI's think this way. I showed them too. :) 

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Another thread on landing the CT...it's been a while!   😎 🍿

IMO, the two primary ways that CT pilots create bad landings are:

1) Too much speed

2) Too high a round out

The CT does NOT like landing fast.  It will float a long way if you have too much speed, and as you hold it off it runs out of energy suddenly and plops down.  Likewise if you flare too high...energy and lift decay suddenly and again, plop.  The worst landings are with too much speed into the round out combined with a high flare.

I admit as a very low time pilot I struggled with landing the CT for a good long while.  Once I figured out the round out sight picture and the speeds the airplane likes, my landings have been very good, and I can put the airplane into very short landing spaces.  My German CT instructor, Michael Christmann, tried to teach me how to land the CT, but I didn't really understand what we was saying until later and I figured it out for myself from experience.  The best landing sequence is NOT "descend and flare"...instead it works out like:

1) descend to 3-5 feet above the runway

2) arrest the descent

3) round out with progressive AoA increase (stick back pressure)

4) touchdown

The "arrest the descent" stage is really the key.  What you do is let the airplane come down to 3-5 feet as stated, then add a slight back pressure to the stick.  You are not trying to get to a round out, landing attitude...you just want to slow down how fast the airplane is approaching the runway.  This buys you some some time so that you don't have to go from a descent attitude to landing attitude in one movement where the margin for error will be higher.  Once the descend is slowed down (not stopped, this is not a round out!), you can judge the landing and gently ease the stick back into the landing attitude.  Because your descent is slow, you have time to work the stick rearward without having to snatch it back to avoid pranging the nose wheel.

The tricky part of arresting the descent is that it happens pretty close to the point at which you encounter ground effect.  Usually ground effect starts about a wingspan above the ground, and is highest at about 10 feet-ish.  So I usually wait for ground effect (which feels like a pause in the descent), holding my attitude constant, and then once the descent continues I judge where to arrest the descent and then round out.  It sounds complicated, but really it's just landing by feel and it starts to feel like once smooth process once you get the hang of the technique. 

An important note is that ground effect is stronger the faster you are going, which is one reason you'll float if you are fast.  At a minimum speed landing, you won't really feel the ground effect much and that in some ways makes the landing easier because you only have to judge your height for the arrest phase.  Yet another good reason to make your landings slow.

What's slow? In calm winds I like 52kt on final at 15° when solo, and 48kt at 30° solo.  55kt/52kt are good numbers for me with a passenger.  My CT (YMMV) will not start to mush in the landing attitude until about 45kt.  If you are used to 60kt approaches, this will feel slow and steep.  Make a tighter pattern, you don't need to be on final a half mile out.  Think about it this way...you will be touching down at 42-48kt no matter your approach speed, if you are flying final at 60kt you have a whole lot of energy that has to come out before touchdown.  It's better to be closer to touchdown speed and have a lot less energy to dissipate.  Looking back I think it might be fair to say every bad landing I have had was done fast, and even now when I make a worse-than-normal landing it's always because I get in a hurry and let my speed creep up. 

Note also that "slow" does not necessarily mean "power off".  You can come down at 48kt with power on, behind the power curve, and enjoy a shallow glide path and gentle descent rate.  You can combine everything I said with Roger's power on approach.  Pitch controls airspeed and power controls altitude, so you can use power to to adjust your glide path if you are low and carry it all the way into landing if you want to, as long as your speed is correct.  I generally use a slip when I'm high rather than adding more flaps; it lets me adjust very finely where I'm going to touch down.

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16 hours ago, Towner said:

I’ve got landings down pretty well, I just choked with another CT pilot watching!

I don't want you to think I was trying to tell you how to fly or land, just riffing off Roger's comments. :)  I think we've all screwed the pooch in front of other pilots, always embarrassing.

One of the scariest things I ever did was land at Oshkosh...if you screw up that landing, all of aviation sees it!

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