In iWoz, Steve Wozniak tells the story of a trip as a passenger in a “small plane” in the 1970s.
“So we flew back [to San Jose] after lunch – and there it was again, another one of those really, really bouncy landings. Again I just thought that’s how you land in small planes. There was a first bounce, then a second bounce that was pretty hard, then a scraping sound, and then it bounced, bounced, bounced, and bounced again for what seemed like the millionth time down the runway.”
When they got out, they saw that the prop was bent.
What do you suppose the pilot did wrong? Reduced power too much so he descended too fast? How else might he have messed up?
I guess landing most any plane is easy once you get the hang of it, assuming good weather and no crosswind and plenty long runway. Likely the weather was fine on Wozniak’s trip, so apparently the pilot didn’t have the hang of it. Is it that hard to get?
In my limited experience flying a small plane (Piper Cherokee) landing a small plane is not hard at all. After just a few dozen landings, I was even able to do smooth crosswind landings (which are quite different in a small plane than in a big jet). A bumpy landing sounds like pilot error, or perhaps a sudden unexpected wind gust.
I porpised maybe once. Generally the trick is to come in nose down (obviously, you are flying downward) then pull the nose up and flare and try to keep the plane level to bleed off speed. Obviously you want to be well above stall speed until you are just about ground level. Then, as the plane slows you keep pulling the nose up.
Stall is where the wings no longer make enough lift to keep flying. Think of it like the water-skier who is done and lets go of the rope - their skis get progressively more nose up as they slow, until that is not enough momentum and they sink.
Flare (level off) too late, the nose hits the ground; pull up a bit too hard and instead of level, you go up - and you don’t want to be 20 feet up when the speed falls to stall speed. So it’s a skill to move the controls back and forth to keep the plane low but above the ground.
In that OP episode, sounds like the pilot flared a little late, hit the ground, the nose bounces upward so the plane tilts up and starts to go up - the pilot overreacts to push the nose down too far, to stay close to the ground, and overcorrects and has the same experience. After all, the landing gear are obviously “springy” to absorb the landing, so if it’s too hard a landing that will help provide the bounce.
No argument with that, but it somehow makes it sound harder than it really is. Flaring at just the right time quickly becomes ingrained and natural. It helps that small planes are so responsive. With a heavy airliner I think you have to start the flare based on altitude, at something like 30 feet above the runway.
I’ve spent many hours teaching people to land small planes.
I’d say flying isn’t “hard” in general, but it is more demanding than driving a car, riding a bike or tossing a ball back and forth. All of your limbs are involved and I’ve seen some people who needed time developing the necessary coordination. Some folks have no problem with that part, but have to work on interpreting what they’re seeing. Those are people who have trouble timing the flare and coordinating the plane (keeping it straight) at the same time.
Humans are not good “multi-taskers”; rather we switch tasks, and in the learning phase people are slow at it. So I saw lots of new learners gradually lose control of one aspect of the approach and landing because they were concentrating too much on something else. Anyone of normal intelligence and basic coordination can learn it though, given repetition and decent instruction.
When I moved into jets I didn’t have much trouble landing. But at that level you’re expected to do things much more precisely and not allow any parameter to go out of limits, which means achieving a stabilized approach quite a bit before you’re close to touchdown. Took me a little time to adjust, but no big deal.
For the OP: Some time go find a large empty parking lot with public access. Perhaps at a mall around sunrise. Now try parking in one of the stalls that doesn’t have bumpers, so you can pull straight through and out the other side. But do it at 50mph. Have somebody film how accurately you fit in your chosen space as you zoom through it.
Once you’re good at that, pick one of the stalls that has a planter or island as one edge. Zoom right up there towards the planter at 50mph and try to keep your tires about 6" away from that curb as you go by.
That’ll give you some flavor of what lightplane pilots are doing. Judging altitude above the ground to within 6-12". But in 3D in a machine that is affected by winds. Winds that shift continuously but non-linearly as you descend.
As @Llama_Llogophile said, the dynamic control “space” has a lot more dimensions than just the three dimensions of actual physical space. Learning to juggle all of them in real time takes practice and effort. And still remains error-prone.
That Woz’s plane was damaged says they ended up in a near-accident situation. As suggested upthread, if the pilot misjudges their altitude when down within a couple feet of the ground, it’s possible to touch down nose wheel first. Which generally leads to a divergent bouncing between nose and main gear.
The correct response is to be ready for that possibility, immediately add full power, and climb away from the runway, then drive around the traffic pattern and try again. The incorrect response, which is what’ll happen naturally if the pilot hasn’t already considered this possibility and made a decision months ago, is to try to use your controls to recover normality out of the cyclic bouncing and continue the landing. That trick (almost) never works. Damaged or wrecked airplanes is the norm, not the exception, once a pitching bounce like that isn’t escaped from by aggressively climbing away from the ground.
Ah but keeping a tail dragged rolling straight is the hard part, they need constant rudder adjustment to avoid a ground loop. It has to do with center of gravity.
The last few feet of the landing and then the entire slowdown process and even taxiing are quite different. The particular risk of touching down nosewheel first setting up a porpoise is of course absent. But a larger basket of other mistake-snakes comes with the tailwheel.
There’s a reason tailwheels are pretty much absent from modern airplanes except those intended to operate off very rough dirt surfaces. The fact the very early airfields were unimproved meadows and pastures has a lot to do with why early airplanes had tailwheels.
I’ve flown mostly Cessna 152/172, though haven’t for many years now. Those particular planes are very “floaty”. They simply try to do everything possible not to land, they’re like seagulls at the beach on a windy day. Even trying to deliberately force stalls while up in the air, they just say “Nah, don’t think I will, you sure you don’t just want to climb up higher?”
So, depending on the particular plane, the landing and approach characteristics can vary quite a lot.
While there are many experienced pilots in this thread, I can give the perspective of a newbie who is just now learning. While I used to think flying was basically like driving a car in three dimensions, there are many things that I never even knew were a thing, much less understood.
Q&A while flying with my instructor, paraphrased heavily.
Why in the world am I steering with my feet while on the ground and why is it so scary to do so at 60 knots? Are you sure this runway is as wide as it’s supposed to be?
What do you mean the pedals perform two functions?
Why does the plane handle much smoother when you do it? It’s all about the trim. “Trim”, what the fuck is “trim” and why does it make things easier?
I know how to turn, why do I need to pay attention to this turn controller thing? Oh boy, time for a new ground school lesson.
And while I’ve worked on approaches and brought us down to a few hundred feet, I’m still not ready to land on my own. (I’m at around 8 hours of Hobbs time so far).
There’s just a lot to it until you have it down (I still don’t) and pulling over and coming to a stop when you do something wrong doesn’t work in the air.
Boy, howdy, you ain’t lying! Way back when (40-something years ago) I thought it would be a great idea to get my pilot’s license and maybe become a bush pilot way up north somewhere. My initial training was in a Piper Tomahawk. That plane was very, very easy to land. Cut the power a bit and raise the nose and it would almost land itself (barring crosswinds or other such).
After a few months of flying the tomahawk, I ran out of money to continue lessons. A year or so later I was financially able to resume flight lessons and the school I went to that time flew Cessna 152s. Talk about a different beast all together! To land one of those I found out rather quickly that you have to point the nose down and fly the damned thing almost into the ground before leveling out and landing. That was a tough transition for me to make!
Ha! Try stalling a Piper Cherokee, as I was forced to do numerous times. It’s a completely different airplane, obviously, and the low-wing configuration also makes a big difference. In any case, forcing a stall in a Cherokee, it goes, “OK. I will now shake like a paint mixer and drop like a rock. Would you like me to go into a spin, too? Sure, happy to oblige!”
I have 50 or so landings in a Cessna 172 and I still don’t have it right. It’s just too many dimensions, too many controls. There’s a big difference between being 6 feet off the ground and 10 feet off the ground, but they look almost the same in the cockpit. You can be lined up correctly but then prop drift causes you to pull left, and now you gotta figure out if you want to use rudder or aileron to get back on center, but then you’re crooked, cutting across the runway, and don’t forget the force required to move the plane changes as your speed changes. Oh, and speaking of speed, did you notice you’re 5 knots too slow and about to stall?
My instructors always say I come in too flat, a little too left of the line. But I never broke anything or anybody, so to be honest, I’m happy with that.
Yeah, they took a while for me to get the hang of landing them also. My lessons were out of a commercial airport with a huuuggggeee runway, and I think it covered up bad habits. When finally getting my license, I found a tiny little rural airstrip that was barely as wide as my wheels to practice cross-winds and touch and gos at. I had a lot of go-arounds, but after getting the knack on that tiny airstrip, everything else turned unconsciously easy to land at.
You haven’t truly lived until you are skittering along on a single wheel in a cross-wind trying to get that other wheel to settle before the hay-bales get too close.
My dad was FAA stationed at DAG in the '70s. DAG is in the middle of the Mojave Desert. On a warm day (110º or 115ºF) a Cessna 150 was trying to land on the black asphalt runway. Everything was fine over the sand, but as soon as the plane crossed over the asphalt it would float up. (Also at DAG, he saw a Aeronca Champion flying backwards due to the wind.)
I learned to fly in my dad’s Cessna 172K. One day my instructor was putting me through a bunch of stalls. One in particular: Flaps down, throttle back and bring the nose up. Maintain altitude by adding power and hold it until it stalled. Soon I was at full power, indicating 40 or 45 mph, and not stalling. When I went to raise the flaps to make it stall, my instructor said, ‘Never mind. You’re stalled.’
I’m going to gently disagree with the Cessna 150s are “floaty” thing. More likely, if you’re floating you’re landing too fast. They also have the advantage of the high-wing, which means they are that much further away from ground effect.
Low-wing planes are inherently more susceptible to float because of ground effect. But again, it’s usually the pilot coming in with too much airspeed. I frequently demonstrated this with students, many of whom were afraid to get too slow (sometimes due to another instructor scaring them by teaching slow flight and stalls ineffectively). It’s OK to stall the plane during landing, as long as you’re a few inches above the runway. In fact, it’s great! It’s also more or less a requirement when you get into tailwheel planes.
As for stalls… I estimate I’ve done about two-thousand of them in various aircraft. Most small planes are built with the expectation of beginner level piloting skills and are usually resistant to all but the worst handling. I’ve never, repeat NEVER seen a stall go bad in a trainer unless we were outright trying to make it enter a spin. And if it does spin, letting go of the controls usually makes it stop.
As I said, a lot of people develop aversions to stalls because somebody made it out to be life threatening and scary. Those shakes and stuff… that’s supposed to happen. It’s a warning that a stall is coming. Having lived in slow flight and stalls for a few years I can tell you there’s nothing to fear, assuming some altitude and a cool head.
Edit: I’ll amend my stall comments for Piper Tomahawks. I’ve never flown one, but I’ve heard tell they are a bit on the dicy side with that t-tail.
I have long felt that the emphasis on stall or near-stall landings in post WW-II lightplanes is a misguided form of ancestor worship from the days of landing Jennys in wheat fields.
IMO it’s smarter to land faster, with solid control authority, and dump the lift by raising the flaps once the wheels are on. Or better yet, fly a plane with spoilers.
Judging height above touchdown will be as difficult as ever, but you lose all the risk associated with trying to stall in ground effect from a foot above the runway.
