Crooked landings

Sure enough, a glance at the mid-field windsock showed a light breeze blowing from about 20 degrees left of the runway numbers. No beginner, she had accumulated a dozen or more solo hours; I expected her to react appropriately, at the proper time.

Alas, when the nose came up to arrest the descent, the crab angle remained. Through the few seconds of level deceleration, no correction was made, and the wheels were allowed to touch, misaligned, and a good five knots early as well. There was a lurch and screech as the Cessna protested its mistreatment, but in its good-natured manner it twisted around to track the centerline, listing slightly to starboard. “Oh, that was rough,” Becky said, aptly critiquing the obvious.

As instructors, we must teach both by example and by allowing students to make mistakes. Within carefully monitored limits, we sometimes have to let the student attempt our demonstrated model with their less-than-perfect skill, so they can understand what poor performance looks and feels like. In Becky’s case, I could see what was coming, and I could have taken over the controls to fix the mistake at the last second. That would have taught her nothing. She already knew what crosswind correction was and had practiced it before solo. This was just the last landing of a long day, and in her fatigued state she got a tad sloppy.

I asked her to evaluate herself as we taxied in. Why was the landing less than desirable? Her reply was, “I was too fast,” and that was true, but only at the moment of contact. While the 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.

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 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.