One of these landings is not like the other

I’ve got a couple of bad habits that I’m working on getting rid of at the moment. Understand that I have plenty to choose from but I’m taking them a couple at a time.

Firstly I know that I really need to focus on my landing technique lest Captain Kangaroo pay a return visit. The good thing is I know exactly what I need to do here. If I’m not careful I have a tendency to fixate on the view just in front of the plane rather than looking down the runway. If I don’t look all the way down to the end, I see the tarmac hurtling up at me rapidly, panic and overreact.  Just as I had to when I first started circuits, I take a moment on short final to do what I call the “shoulder shuffle”. That is, I take a deep breath, exhale and bring my shoulders and upper body back and relaxed. That way my line of sight is where it should be and my arms are relaxed enough to get the necessary kinaesthetic feedback. Tension is not a friend of good landings.

Conversely bad habit number 2 involves being too relaxed. I’m really working on not letting the stupid mistakes creep in at the end of a flight, maybe where mentally my brain is already (prematurely) congratulating me for surviving.  Examples of this include the taxiing incident after my first solo* and idling the engine too much after a set of solo circuits so that the damn thing cut out on me.

After my reasonably successful foray out to the practice area and back, I was very conscious of not screwing up the stupid stuff at the end.  To this end I really wanted to nail that landing. I mean I’m trying to prove to Bob that I can get to Claremont and back on my own. A big part of that is convincing him that I’m going to be able to land at the conclusion!

So I set up for the landing (actually a touch and go planned but it’s all the same ‘til after you hit the deck). After a nice long final in; giving me a beautiful stabilised approach, I set up for the landing. I took a deep breath brought my upper body back, way back and started the hold off and flare, I’m in the required nose up attitude, slowly bleeding off the airspeed, the stall horn starting to kick in. Great! Except that this landing does not look like any other I’ve seen, something is wrong.

Bob urges me to add some power to arrest the sink. I’m in a beautiful flare but I’m still about 50ft off the freakin’ runway! Ooh that could have been nasty! Broken gear, tail strike, both maybe. I let her come down a bit, reflare and pull off a decent touch and go despite myself.

During the debrief we talk about what went wrong. I concentrated on relaxing and bringing my self back and the nose up, but did it waaaaay to early. I knew that landing wasn’t right and luckily my tendency to bail out and go for the overshoot would have come into play here. I was about to power out of there because I knew it wasn’t right. Bob helped me recover it without the need for a go-around but solo I would have overshot.

Seems like it’s not just guys who overcompensate!

 

 

*Yep I know I still haven’t told you what I did here, maybe I never will ;)