Know Where to Look During the Flare

[Music] greetings folks I'm Raj Machado thank you for visiting my aviation Learning Center can we talk as a student pilot are you having trouble learning to flare an airplane for landing and perhaps you're an experienced pilot who is finding it harder and harder to make consistently smooth landings and well find yourself resorting to unusual excuses to explain these sudden impacts to your passengers I'm speaking of excuses of such caliber as microburst or tectonic plates shifting and even extra-strong localized gravity waves in the runway environment okay perhaps I can help you by offering a few common reasons why pilots have difficulty with mastering the landing flare first if your student pilot who's beginning the landing phase of flight training you're flooding structure probably told you to look directly over the airplanes nose as you begin the landing flare in other words the round out and flare so let's think about this place yourself on final approach converging on a tiny runway lying flat on a large planet as you begin the round out and the flare the airplanes nose typically rises in your windscreen blocking your view of everything ahead of you as you look straight ahead as instructed the planet you're approaching at 65 knots suddenly disappears along with the runway attached to it and this normally evokes a reaction that I call the hey where did it go response now how uncomfortable is it to lose sight of an approaching planet while you're still descending toward it not too comfortable at all here's the problem your instructor might be providing you with a strategy that he or she uses to land an airplane without realizing that you might not have the perceptual skill to use that strategy consider this when a flight instructor lands an airplane he or she might indeed be looking directly over the airplanes nose but he's not looking for what can't be see the runway we can't see through the engine cowling despite his protestations otherwise now what he can sense at least to a degree are details in the periphery that's right your flight instructor is actually using peripheral clues to the right and left of the nose to gauge his or her height above the runway now while peripheral vision doesn't expand as you gain more landing experience you can learn to better perceive objects in your periphery with training and that is exactly what your flight instructor has learned to use and come to rely on to land the airplane he's learned to use his peripheral vision to aid in evaluating his height above and closer rate with the runway during the landing flare now as a student pilot you don't have any experience to do that so you have to learn to use a different method at first to land because you're unable to use your peripheral vision and the way your flight instructor does that's why student pilots should use the landing technique that I call the find the planet strategy here's how it works as you begin the round out you should shift your visual focus to the left side of the engine cowling to a triangular shaped viewing area bordered by the left side of the windscreen the distant horizon and the left side of the engine cowling that's right you can actually see the horizon to the left side of the engine cowling despite the fact that it disappears when looking directly over the airplanes nose during the landing flare amazing right the geometry of this area is shaped like a slice of pizza which I call the domino effect and in it you'll see the left side of the runway as well as a small slice of the distant horizon congratulations you've just found planet Earth again evoking what I call the hey there it is response now your job is to find then look at a spot on the runway that appears to be stationary it's the same spot you see ahead of you while driving on the freeway that just loses its blurry features and appears to become stationary because it's far ahead of you now at most approach speeds in an airplane this is typically located about 80 to 100 feet ahead of the airplane this non moving non blurry spot allows you to assess your height above and vertical closure rate with the runway keep in mind that perceptually speaking the non moving or non blurry spot on the runway will shift toward you as the airplane slows down therefore your runway focal point moves closer to the cockpit as the airplane decelerates during the landing flare and this is how you accurately keep track of your height and closure rate with the runway but there's another problem that most folks don't consider and it involves their dominant eye now your dominant eye is not the eye that brow beats the other eye pun intended it's the eye that you can rely on for precision visual measurement for instance when you look through the sighting mechanism of a gun you typically close one eye and rely on the dominant eye came at the target now why is the dominant eye important when you're learning to land an airplane well let's identify your dominant eye first and then I'll explain why here's what I want you to do make a triangle with both index fingers and thumbs no this isn't the itsy-bitsy spider which actually starts out like this and why I know that is deeply disturbing to me and perhaps to you too but let's move on now stretch your arms out in front of you and with both eyes open move the center of the triangle to some small object at least 20 feet away now what I want you to do is move that triangle towards your face while keeping that object centered in the triangle and as you do that you see what's happening here the triangle has come to rest over the dominant eye and in my case it's the right eye which is not surprising since I'm right-handed since 85 to 90 percent of the population is right-handed their right eye will typically be the dominant eye and yes there are exceptions but we won't discuss these here what does eye dominance mean to you when you learning to land well it means that you want to ensure that your dominant eye can at least see as much of the runway as your other eye and that means doing more than a token neck twist to shift your vision to the left think about it this way baseball players with right eye dominance are taught to rotate their heads to the left a little more than normal when batting to better identify the trajectory speed and spin of the ball if they rely primarily on their left non-dominant eye when batting then they'll often be heard to say hey where to go as the ball sneaks over the plate so during round out when you shift your vision to the left to look through the slice of pizza I really need you to shift your vision to the left now don't be a about it move it twist that head and shift your body to the left as necessary so that your right eye has the optimal view of the stationary spot on the runway don't worry you won't fall out of the airplane after all you have your seat belt on and since you haven't paid the instructor yet he will most likely grab you before you tumble out onto the runway so you'll be surprised at how helpful this technique is when learning to land an airplane since I mentioned that many flight instructors want you to look over the nose during the landing flare keep this idea in mind most flight instructors have a right dominant eye they are also right-handed and that means they are naturally disposed to better peripheral visual acuity to the right additionally they have a right hand on the yoke that's naturally trying to respond to these right peripheral visual clues in other words while flight instructors feel they can look over the nose to flare an airplane in reality they are unknowingly relying on their trained peripheral vision as well as their right eye dominance and right eye hand coordination to actually make their landing assessment when learning to land from the left seat as a right eye dominant student pilot you have none of the flight instructors advantages and this is why despite an instructors good intentions students often have trouble learning to land an airplane now here's one more thing to over the years I've flown with many pilots over the age of 50 who found that they were having difficulty landing smoothly when they've done so consistently in the past and in many instances these individuals thought they were losing their airmanship proficiency if you became so discouraged that they considered giving up flying all together unfortunately I was able to show them why they are drawing the wrong conclusions regarding their landing difficulty it turns out that our peripheral vision decreases as we age along with diminishing pupil size visual acuity and so on an experienced pilot in his or her prime can certainly rely on more of their peripheral vision to aid in landing an airplane as we age however the loss of peripheral vision requires that we return to the strategy used by student pilots when they first learn to land in other words we must return to looking through the pizza sliced to the left side of the airplane to properly judge our height and closure rate with the runway now when I've shown older pilots how to use this technique nearly all were able to dramatically increase the quality of their landings so those are a few thoughts to consider about learning to land an airplane and hopefully these ideas will increase the quality of your landings perhaps even prevent you from having to well convert your airplanes Goodyear tires into a new brand called may pops or could blows I'm Rob Machado thank you so much for tuning in hello folks this is rod Machado or at least his avatar I'd like to invite you to take a look at my new six-hour interactive e-learning course on handling in-flight emergencies now this course covers almost every common emergency that a pilot might experience throughout his or her flying career and I'm talking about such things as handling split flat conditions dealing with aileron rudder and elevator failure the six ways to control the pitch when the elevator does fail what to do in a door or window pops open in-flight dealing with engine fires in flight wing fires in flight cab fires in flight understanding your airplanes electrical system so that you can handle and overcharging or under charging alternator dealing with autopilot problems what to do when your engine quits how to ditch an airplane and how to crash an airplane and survive the impact to name a few so check it out at rod Machado dot-com

Channel: Rod Machado

Views: 300,519

Rating: 4.9197731 out of 5

Keywords: Landing, roundout, flare, landing flare, rod machado, machado, airplane, learning to fly, become a pilot, flight training, flying lessons, stick and rudder, stick and rudder skills, flying skills, private pilot, commercial pilot, airline pilot, pilot, flying, rod machado's aviaiton learning center

Id: 4v5tOtdx7xs

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017