Recently I’ve begun playing with the Android version of X-Plane 10, which is remarkably good for a smartphone based flightsim. Although the initial set of airport and scenery choices is limited, at least with the initial free rollout, the app does give you remarkably crisp and detailed visuals of the RL regions around those airports. We’re not talking Google Street View here, but it is pretty close in clarity to what you’d see from an airplane window flying overhead. This is utterly unlike lesser flight sim apps where airports like those of Zürich, London, and Rome seem to be located on tiny islands in the midst of vast oceans.
Possibly because X-Plane 10 is so appealing, I’m finally trying to learn out to land. The basic principle seems to be throttle down, let out some flaps, don’t descend too slow or too fast, and keep the runway lined up.
It’s that last part with which I’m having trouble. Somehow, I can’t seem to help letting the plane drift slightly askew of the runway, and once that happens, I can’t seem to get lined up again. In trying to do so, I overcompensate and end up too far on the other side, and if I’m lucky I end up landing on the taxiway.
Assuming that the controls work broadly the same across most or all flightsim games, what approaches to landing have worked for you?
You might try practicing not by trying to land, but just by trying to line up with the runway at, say 1000 feet, and flying level along it at moderate speed.
It takes awhile in a real airplane to get used to the challenge of accurately seeing your deviation left & right. And learning how to control that. Your ground track is a 5th-order resultant of your control inputs. That level of indirection causes a lot of challenges.
i.e. you input some left or right aileron. How much aileron you put in controls your roll rate. How long you permit that roll rate to continue controls your bank angle. How much bank times how long you leave the bank in controls how much heading change you make. How much heading change times how fast you’re going controls how far your ground track moves left or right compared to the imaginary line on the ground you’re trying to track.
And once you have moved your track laterally enough, you need to reverse the process to align your track with the line you’re trying to follow. Now add some changing wind or changing speed and it gets more fun.
So a good learning technique is to think a bit about this indirection. And then to simplify the task by flying level at a constant altitude & speed with no wind while tracking the extended centerline of the runway.
Once you can do that, then add in the complexity of trying to descend and simply impact the runway at the beginning. After you can do that, add controlling your speed at a constant value all the way down. After you can do that, add proper use of flaps & gear and continuous slowing to the proper approach speed. After you can do all that, try adding a round-out and flare at the bottom instead of spiking it onto the runway.
The way most folks try to teach themselves to land is to focus on the touchdown. That’s the last step to learn, not the first.
You may be giving yourself too long of an approach at a straight-in direction with the runway. It’s difficult in real life to hold a perfect straight track for a long period of time, especially if the runway is at a long distance away. Your seemingly micro-corrections to angle of alignment when far away result in a large change relative to the runway (i.e. trigonometry). Especially on a computer screen, it is hard to determine you are significantly off course until you are very off course.
Real-world approaches prefer to use up most of the distance coming in at an angle to the runway / pattern. Then when turning to “final” for the runway, you are already very close in distance to the runway and your alignment corrections have a much greater margin for error.
LSLGuy had many good tips also. Just try flying over the runway in line with it, then turn back, and fly over again repeatedly. Make a ‘rectangle’ pattern with one of the long sides as the runway.
Intuitively, I would have thought that controlling the speed all the way down would be learned before making an impact with the runway.
In a way, learning a complex skill is fundamentally like learning drill: You practice Step 1 until you master it. Then Step 2. Then you combine Step 1 & Step 2. Then you master Step 3. Then 1+2+3. Then 4, then 1+2+3+4 etc.
You turn the act of climbing a 10’ wall into climbing a 10’ staircase.
Hurtling amateurishly toward the ground and as long as the crew compartment hasn’t blown up, I consider it a successful landing. I play Kerbal Space Program.
The hard part, especially with the craptacular visual provided by old real simulators or current PC/tablet game-sims, is seeing your path through space and controlling up/down & left/right with enough accuracy to impact the ground at the spot you want. And I do mean impact; just fly until you crash on the runway numbers, then reset back out to 5 miles or whatever & do it again.
In a descent, your path and your speed are inversely connected. If you steepen the path, the speed increases. If you shallow the path, the speed decreases. Likewise, path & power are connected. Add power and you flatten, subtract power and you steepen. And depending on the aircraft type & where you are in the overall speed envelope, slowing down can either steepen or shallow the descent, while speeding up will do the opposite.
Trying to juggle those three balls that are interconnected by springs isn’t easy at first. Best IMO to simply ignore speed and power and try to control aimpoint. Once a sim-gamer can do that reliably then it’s time to add trying to descend at a realistic constant angle and a realistic speed (and therefore power setting) for the type you’re simulating.
Or, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, maybe try heading for the taxiway and end up on the runway instead? D
I don’t know how typical it is for flightsims, but with the X-Plane series for smartphones, you typically hold the phone horizontally in front of you, as if you were watching a video or looking at a landscape photo. This is your neutral position, with ailerons. You can’t operate the ailerons individually, but can bank by partially rotating the screen in the way that seems natural for the intended bank maneuver–e.g. clockwise for a right turn. You can also turn by using the rudder, and this too results in a bank at the same time.
Since I posted this thread I’ve finally managed to land well enough to earn a passing grade in the Flight School section of the game, but still, it was sure as hell a sloppy landing. But it’s encouraging. I’m sure now it’s just a question of practice.
Does it seem to you that simulators, in general, come fairly close to the behavior of aircraft IRL? Either way, I suppose one of the first things you have to learn is that turning a plane or holding a straight course is very little like driving and turning a car.
Google Earth Flight Simulator is another one that I use, and one that you may be familiar with.
To some extend you are probably just reaching the limits of precision of your phone’s tilt sensors. In addition to detecting the direction of the force of gravity, the sensor will also detect the direction of any other forces you inadvertently apply to the phone as you move it around. Any slight movement translating the phone left, right, up, or down will affect the sims control inputs.
