8 SMALL Tweaks That Improve Your Landings FOREVER

here are eight tactics that are really easy to implement that could make all of your Landings way better the first super important thing to know is that if we want to get better at Landing we need to get better at Energy Management in other words if you can learn to feel and control how much energy or buoyancy so to speak that the airplane has really you can land any plane so here are eight tactics to work on your energy management and they're grouped by inflight practice approach the actual Landing itself and then there's one Wild Card tip that's kind of weird but I think it could help a lot and I'll share that at the end first in our inflight practice section I really like to practice slowlight from time to time now many of us just learn it during private or commercial or whatever then we don't really go back to it but this is a super super helpful exercise in energy management especially if I haven't flown in a few weeks maybe because of bad weather or maintenance or both sometimes which kind of sucks uh I really like going out and starting my flight at 60 knots go flight nice and slow and try to get accustomed to slow flight again and feeling the energy or the buoyancy of the air plane there's a really awesome book called stick and Rudder if you haven't read it it's a really old book but I think it it practically and poetically describes uh how to fly an airplane one of the things they talk about is energy management and they describe it as feeling how much lift how much energy how much buoyancy does the airplane seem to have you can kind of feel it in your seat when you're flying slow when you're flying at Cruise you don't really get a good sense you have so much extra energy the airplane can work with you don't really have a great sense of how much it has until you're kind of on the edge and slowlight really helps you better understand that and and get a good handle on it next kind of similar to slow flight is that I like to fly down part of the runway in ground effect or close to it because that moment between like 100 ft off the ground and touching down there's really only a few critical seconds there and you're only getting a few seconds of practice of that energy management near the ground so sometimes I find it helpful to fly a full approach but then right before touchdown add just a little bit of power Don't Go full power you're just adding enough power to maintain a safe air speed and you're staying in ground effect you're practicing that energy management close to the ground and then either you can land you know farther down the runway make sure you have enough room or you can execute a go around and the reason I think this is so helpful is because normally when you're doing slow flight you're thousands of feet in the air and you're focused on plus or minus 50 feet plus or minus 100 feet but if you're doing this down most of the length of the runway you don't have plus or minus 50 fet to work with you're plus or minus 5 feet or something so your tolerances become much smaller but you're forced to put your your eyes outside of the airplane and then you're forced to use the throttle to manage your energy and and um make sure you're not losing altitude or gaining too much altitude so it's super helpful but then the other reason I really like it is that it gives you some extra seconds of repetition of flying near the ground but intentionally not touching the ground because normally when you land you go from like 100 feet down to touchdown that that that moment of like zero to 20 feet only lasts a hair of a second and so this gives you you know gives you more time practicing what that environment is going to feel like and it's not just a it's not just a a moment of transition we're like oh was 100 feet now I'm on the ground no you get to you get to kind of practice that in between I find it really helpful next is the stuff you can do on the approach to help with your Landing the first thing here is to use trim for air speed and use throttle for altitude I've heard some people describe it the other way around and they swear that it works for them but I've just never found that to work for me in my experience if you can get the airplane trimmed into the right air speed then the approach becomes really easy because you're just making some really small adjustments in your power to control thec rate and using the trim to fine-tune your air speed is really helpful because you can get really specific with it you're not using the entire Yol and chasing the attitude chasing the pitch to try to really hone in on an air speed if you can pitch it and literally take your hands off the Yol for a second and the airplane holds that altitude then yeah you can trim it in from or or really fine tune it from 62 knots to 60 knots and be precise so I really really love using an excessive amount of trim on the approach my favorite instructor always used to tell me are you high low fast or slow and most importantly what are you going to do about it so I use pitch for air speed and power for altitude next with that in mind most of us are flying our approaches entirely too fast let's just be honest and in really efficient wings like on the Cessnas like a Cessna 172 182 that sort of thing any extra air speed you're carrying in is just going to cause you to float unnecessarily down the runway in my 182 I found that 60 knots or about 70 mph is a perfect approach speed if it's really really Gusty I'll add a little bit to that but but generally speaking 60 knots is the number the thing that can be tempting is landing on really long runways you're like okay well 60 knots okay I'm at 64 and I'm close enough it's easy to get lazy and say well 64 is close enough to to 60 but what happens when you go to the back country and 60 knots needs to be 60 knots you can get really lazy and I'm I say you it's really me I'm talking to I can get really lazy of saying yeah I'll fly close to 60 knots and then when it really counts and you need to be 60 knots you don't have as much practice really really nailing that number and so it's kind of like you know back in football for me like if if I practiced really lazily that week I would play really and I'll I'll be honest I didn't I didn't play a lot of football I practiced a lot of football but I noticed like coaches were always yelling at us like you need to be playing at game speed because what's going to happen when it comes to the game you're going to play like you practice and so I I try to be disciplined and I'm nobody's perfect but if if the if the approach needs to be 60 knots make it 60 knots next on the approach is to practice spot Landings and this might sound obvious but it makes a huge difference to practice spot Landings CU I think many of us landing on 5,000 ft or 7,000 ft runways we can kind of land Whenever Wherever and it's fine it's easy to get lazy hey just put it down somewhere in the first you know thousand feet or so and it doesn't make a difference but it flexes an entirely new muscle to instead say I want that specific spot to be my touchdown Point not only that I want to manage my energy in such a way that the airplane has no remaining energy to fly right at that touchdown point now sounds great I will be the the first to raise my hand and say this is a lot harder than it sounds sometimes a quick story on this a while back I got to fly with Tac Arrow flying in their top cub and the mission was to go through some Backcountry training and then ultimately land on a river Sandbar it was an awesome day of flying and I was able to make some decent Landings but then once they said all right now let's practice spot Landings here's your spot hit this spot and don't be fast or don't float past it and then I got really humbled little Flo past it I kept floating past the spot and you learned that your aiming Point needs to actually be before your touchdown point that might sound obvious to everyone listening no duh but when things are happening really fast it's easy to get it wrong because you're just aiming for like a general point on the runway instead of a specific landing spot now as the day went on I got a little bit better with this and ultimately we were able to land on the SandBar and it was one of the coolest Aviation training experiences I've ever had so I'll put a link down in the description if you want to go watch the full video ni it was an absolute blast I got to document the whole thing and I learned a lot about Landings that day so the takeaway here is to practice your Landings by picking an exact touchdown spot that you're trying to nail now we don't always have a massive Green Dot painted on the runway like they do at Oshkosh to use as our Target but the 1,00 foot markers are really helpful instead and and they're also helpful because you aren't needing to touch down like a ride at the start of the runway but you also have lots of Runway left too so try to hit the start of those 1,00 ft markers right as the stall warning is going off it's really great practice now on the actual Landing here are some things to implement first is to not get spoiled landing on Long runways I'm based at a 7,000 foot Runway most of us are landing on on runways that long and it's easy to get sloppy because there's no consequence for being sloppy and so wherever possible I really try to treat long runways like their short runways next is to treat Landing as a flight maneuver there's a lot happening right before touchdown and so I think it's easy to sometimes get in the mindset of well we'll just we'll cross over the numbers we'll chop the power and we'll just kind of hold it off and let it settle on the runway that's not necessarily bad thing to do but I do think it can lead us into a little bit more of a passive mindset we're a little bit more of a passenger in that point it's something that's just kind of happening around us instead of something that we're intentionally causing the airplane to do but I noticed a really big shift in my Landings when I when I kind of changed my mentality from Landing just being something that kind of happened you try to just let it settle on the ground to instead being in intentional flight maneuver so just like slowlight or stalls or steep turns are all intentional flight Maneuvers Landings can be exactly the same so what that means is intentionally putting the airplane's wheels Softly on the ground where you want on the runway at the air speed you want and at The Descent rate you want so you don't bounce now it's hard to get all of those things right at the same time in unison but that's also what makes it really rewarding now practically speaking I find that I make the best Landings whenever I'm slow enough if I'm going too fast this won't work but I'm slow enough to where as I come in um I can flare using the existing energy that the airplane has I'm not touching the throttle yet you're just using the energy to arrest the syn rate and then going I'm pulling out the throttle here on my Cessna bear with me um and then then I go idle on the throttle to then let the airplane touch down if you notice on airliners and maybe it's not like this every time but I've really noticed that that this seems to be how they do it where they'll come in and then you notice the flare you notice the change in energy and then you can hear the engines go to Idol seems how they do it and I tend to make much better Landings when I do it this way now you might have to reduce the throttle before you get to the flare depending on your speed really just comes down to energy management but the point is this I think you'll find the right technique to use in the moment when you just tell yourself this I'm intentionally flying this airplane all the way to the ground I'm not just giving up on it and ground effect and hoping we land smoothly and with all of this talk about energy management here is my Wild Card tip this might sound weird but try watching the birds in your backyard or your Park sometime just go with me here I mean they log more flight time so to speak than we ever will and they're Masters at managing their energy try to take notice how they can go from Full Speed to turning and slowing down and perfectly landing on a branch with no residual Forward Motion I mean I love watching seagull land on docks and things or Birds land on a power line I mean they fly better approaches than I ever will and it's because they understand how to manage their energy and flying a plane really is the same thing eventually we're not just learning how tool control an airplane but we're learning what it means to fly and those are two really different things the best lessons I've learned in landing came from flying with Tac Arrow like I mentioned earlier now it's probably the biggest and most challenging video I've ever made from a production standpoint and I'm really proud of it but I think you'll enjoy it and learn something from it too that video is on the screen right now and so I'll see you there [Music]

Channel: Airplane Academy

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Id: 5n5vP90AwP0

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024