What makes a great landing?

The Sewanee-Franklin County Airport (UOS) is notorious for welcoming transients to our narrow, short runway with challenging and gusty crosswinds. Local pilots often gathered late afternoons on the front porch to sip iced tea and watch the landings of pilots who chose to up their skills with a visit. During my early days of flight training, I assumed my position on “Vulture Row,” as we called ourselves, to relax after a long day at the university and learn from legendary flight instructor Bill Kershner.

“What makes a landing great?” Ask that of a fellow pilot and you’ll undoubtedly hear about the importance of touching down with minimal vertical speed so that passengers barely notice when the wheels hit the runway. But Kershner explained there are several ingredients to a good landing, and of those, touching down softly doesn’t even rank near the top. Let’s consider some of the factors that make up a good landing.

Approach and landing speed: Adding a buffer to approach speed in gusty conditions is a good idea, but pilots tend to go overboard with it. Entering the flare with too high an airspeed often results in the aircraft ballooning upward with a nose-high attitude and the pilot trying to compensate by pushing forward on the yoke. It’s easy to get out of phase with the aircraft and experience a pilot-induced oscillation (see “Push-Pull,” August 2021 AOPA Pilot). Touching down in a nose-low attitude can result in a loss of directional control, a prop strike, and shearing off the nose gear.

If the pilot enters the flare with excess speed and manages to flare slowly enough to avoid a pilot-induced oscillation, the airplane still needs to lose that energy for a full-stop landing. Since landing distance is proportional to the square of the groundspeed at touchdown, excess airspeed has a profound effect on landing performance. For example, if an airplane normally touches down at 60 knots but does so at 70 knots instead, the 17 percent speed increase results in a 36 percent longer ground roll.

Finally, approaching with a high airspeed means more time and distance in the flare to slow down for an appropriate touchdown speed. In gusty conditions, that involves aileron and rudder jockeying. Approach with a responsible airspeed so that the airplane is done flying sooner.

Crab angle: Most general aviation aircraft have a landing gear system that is not designed to incur side loading, so it’s critical to touch down with the longitudinal axis parallel to the direction of travel. The rudder is the control surface that can make that happen, but its effectiveness is proportional to the flow of air across it. The slower the aircraft, the greater the deflection needs to be. But low and slow is where pilots feel anxious about large rudder deflections (see “Don’t Be Shy,” August 2024 AOPA Pilot). As an examiner, I routinely see pilots land in a crab. A nosewheel aircraft tends to self-correct on touchdown, so pilots can get away with sloppy rudder work. But that doesn’t instill passenger confidence, fails to extend aircraft longevity, and can result in losing directional control. After practical exams, I often suggest candidates pursue a tailwheel endorsement to hone their rudder technique.

Landing spot: Whether it’s the 1,000-foot markers or another pre-chosen spot on the runway, pilots should select a point and touch down at that point with little variation among landings. On practical exams, candidates stress about small tolerances for short-field and power-off one-eighty landings. What many don’t realize is that the Private Pilot – Airplane Airman Certification Standards (ACS) specify a tolerance for the normal landing as well: within 400 feet of the specified point. In the commercial ACS, the tolerance is just 200 feet. All landings should occur precisely on centerline so you have as much runway as possible on either side if you need it.

Throttle use: In the pattern, where we operate on the back side of the power curve, power controls altitude and pitch controls airspeed, but I see way too much throttle jockeying there. A worthwhile goal is to never need to increase power from the downwind leg on. With sufficient altitude, throttle isn’t even necessary. Some years back I gave a commercial practical exam to Drew Freeman, a pilot who trained under his own old-time instructor, Ken King, from the grass strip at Moontown Airport (3M5) in Alabama. King never allowed his students to reintroduce throttle after closing it on the downwind leg. I first asked Freeman for a normal landing, and after reducing the throttle to idle, he proceeded to plant the mains on the 1,000-foot markers in a beautiful nose-high attitude. I felt silly asking him next for a power-off one-eighty, but I wasn’t surprised when he performed the same beautiful landing. Learning to land consistently without power is great practice.

Impact acceleration: No one wants a carrier landing that threatens the landing gear integrity. But touching down on centerline with zero crab angle in a nose-high attitude and the stall horn blaring are ingredients at least as, if not more, important (see “Flare Is Not a Four-Letter Word,” June 2020 AOPA Pilot). Orchestrating the approach and landing so that the airplane stalls just inches above the runway ensures a soft landing.

It seems like such landings will become extinct when the old-time instructors aren’t with us anymore. Recently, however, I uploaded the flight data recorded by my Bonanza’s avionics to flysto.net and was delighted by the ability to grade every approach and landing. The software presents more than 30 parameters including approach and landing speed, flare duration, crab angle and pitch attitude at touchdown, landing spot (both distance down the runway and deviation from centerline), and touchdown impact. With some old-time advice and new tools to assess, we can strive to include all these good ingredients to make great landings.