I’ll agree with that when it comes to bigger airplanes***. But I used to work out of a 2200’ runway, so we couldn’t afford much float. Hence, we taught full-stall landings.
*** When I first started flying multi-engine aircraft I had to be re-educated to NOT land on the first brick. It felt unnatural to me to aim for the touchdown zone. What? Leave runway behind me???
They do float with those barn doors (flaps) full down. I moved from a Champ tail dragger to a 150. The 150 instructor always wanted full flaps ??? Which made no sense with all that runway ahead. The Champ I started with had no flaps and Stan Robertson, my instructor forbid throttle on for base and final. I had to make the runway using my pattern altitude.
I learned in a 150 and don’t remember it being very floaty, but the 172 is a different story, at least solo or with only one other in the plane. I didn’t fly a 177 very often but it was way less floaty. In did have a slight tendency to porpoise, a brief application of the throttle stopped that.
Brian
I took some lessons as well, but I always assumed that any skill was more a reflection of the instructor than anything I did.
My only experience in aviation is flying model areoplanes, but I think (or wildly guess) we as a species are not really good at height perception.
I was not a great model aviator, and my landings tended to be very rough.
We seem to be good at distance perception.
Echoing what the others have said. It’s not hard per se but it’s a skill that needs to be learned. Any skill is difficult when you don’t know how to do it and it becomes easier as you learn and practice. If a baby could talk they’d tell you that standing up and walking is hard. By the time they’re a toddler they can generally do it ok without too many mishaps. Once they’re older than 4 or 5 they’re running around the place like a maniac. As an adult we would say that walking is one of the easiest things we do, but we still occasionally fuck it up and slip over, or walk into the edge of the bed at night, or fall down the stairs.
likewise with landing a plane (light or not), if you don’t know how to do it it’s hard, if you do know how but don’t get much practice then it’s maybe easyish but you might get it wrong more often than you’d like, and if you know how and are well practiced then it becomes easy. However it can still go wrong because we are fallible humans who make mistakes, even when doing something we consider to be easy (like walking).
Regarding Steve Wozniak’s story, the pilot’s mistake wasn’t really the initial hard landing, it’s what happened afterwards. Hard landings can happen to any pilot, the trick is to recognise when things are going badly and decide to go around for a second attempt.
I heard of one of the local bush pilots who flew float planes to remote fishing spots. He’d carry a couple of medium rocks in the plane, fly over the lake and drop one in then go back around and land. Apparently on a calm day the water would be so glassy that without ripples, it was difficult to gauge height. (And in winter, it was good trick to tell you if the ice was thick enough)
I found something similar when I tried a parachute jump - as I approached the ground, a nice big field of mowed grass, I found it hard to judge looking down whether I was 50 feet up, or 20 feet, or 10, all I saw below was grass blades. They gave you a radio to listen to someone on the ground who told you when to flare (as well as guiding your turns on the way down.)
The hard part about learning to fly is that it’s all real-time. There’s not time, even in comparatively low-speed airplanes, for a lot of consideration while maneuvering. You need to see and react right now. The main difference between a trainee pilot and a skilled one while maneuvering is how little deviation the skilled pilot experiences before they notice and correct it. Conversely the newbie ends up letting things get worse before they notice the deviation, then takes longer to decide how to correct, then longer to make the correction. All of which greatly amplifies the deviations and can easily turn into them chasing a situation rather than controlling it.
And trying to review what just went less than great can’t happen right now because you’re busy with what happened next and is still happening now and will be happening in the next 10 seconds.
Different phases of flight have different degrees of task compression, with landings and takeoffs the busiest, while cruise is relatively lightly task-loaded. Simply driving around the traffic pattern can be real busy for a newbie. Later on there’s lots of time to talk or think about things while your mind’s background processing has been trained to keep the airplane going straight and level at constant speed, altitude, and track. Even that much is challenging at first.
@md-2000:
Yeah. Glassy water, mowed grass, dry lake beds, truly huge Strategic Air Command runways. All of them make it hard bordering on impossible to judge your height accurately. Leveling off to a flare/stall landing at 3 feet (or -1 feet) is majorly bouncy and may lead to damage. At 10 feet it’s probably a total-the-aircraft-but-walk-away crash. At 50 feet it’s a certain fatal crash.
Big fast airplanes pretty much all have radar altimeters which provide some sort of verbal countdown of altitude below the main wheels. Because it’s just too hard otherwise to get a safe result every time.
Glassy water … think that was the cause of at least a few crashes when Pan Am and Imperial Airways were using flying boats.
Speaking of radar altimeters: interesting read on page 78 of Flying Magazine (November 1976) about landing a C-124 100% blind. When did they become common? A more important tool than I thought.
Funny but I remembered your cited article as soon as I read “landing a C-124 100% blind”. I was a freshman in college when that issue came out.
RA’s were invented as an avionic unit in the 1930s and deployed en masse in the airline fleets shortly after WW-II. This is a pretty good article: Radar altimeter - Wikipedia.
I got my fixed-wing license first. When I started helicopters, I couldn’t get the landings right. Takeoffs were good, patterns were good, approaches were good, flares were good… It was just the last few feet I was hung up on. My instructor was baffled. He couldn’t figure out why I was having trouble with that last bit. It finally occurred to me that I was trying to land a helicopter like an airplane. In an airplane, you hold the yoke/stick back and stall the wing right as your mains touch the runway, then keep holding the nose up to bleed off speed. In a helicopter, you push the cyclic forward to level the skids. So that’s what I did. My instructor was amazed, and wondered how he finally got through to me. I told him I figured it out myself. 
I don’t agree with this. I can’t imagine having a nose-down attitude on approach unless you are in some kind of mad hurry to get down on the ground (snakes in the plane maybe?)
On a normal approach you have a nose-up attitude. You descend by reducing power, not by pointing the nose at the ground.
On safety pamphlets in commercial aircraft, which use images rather than words to convey the safety messages, the take-off phase is illustrated with a plane angled upwards, and landing with a plane angled downwards. Which makes some kind of intuitive sense but doesn’t reflect the reality.
Ha ha! Other than a little bit of real-life flying in a Piper Cherokee, I got pretty good at flying and landing a DC-3 in Microsoft Flight Simulator (not part of the MS package – it was a third-party add-on, and lots of fun!). I once “flew” it across the ocean in real time from YYZ to LHR using “cheat” options the DC-3 never had: GPS guidance, infinite fuel, and some help from the autopilot.
But I couldn’t land a simulated jet airliner worth a shit. The problem I had was the slow response of this massive airplane. I’m guessing this is why the concept of a “stabilized approach” is so important for airliners – you need to be lined up with the runway, at the right altitude for distance, and on the proper glide slope so that you only need to make minimal adjustments for a proper touchdown. With a light plane it’s much more visual and manual.
Swept wing jets fly their approach where the nose of the airplane is 2-4 degrees above the horizon while the flightpath is typically 3 degrees below the horizon. For a 5-7 degree difference.
Straight wing slow moving airplanes have a much smaller difference between fuselage and flightpath. Like 1 or 3 degrees. So while flying the same 3 degree descent they’ll have a level to slightly nose-down attitude.
A similar effect occurs on takeoff and early climbout. You’ll find jetliners with their nose way up in the air compared to the flight path. If you look at vids of 1950s piston airliners, they pretty much rise off the ground in a level to very slightly nose up attitude and their flight path is more or less exactly where the nose is pointed. Likewise on approach a vid taken from near the runway will be looking at the top of the fuselage, not the underside, as the airplane descends towards the runway. Looks weird.
Right. The first time my friend took me flying in his Cessna 152, I was surprised how much it felt like we were pointing down towards the ground during part of the landing approach (or maybe it was still just the “descent.”) (I am not a pilot).
Yep. Success comes from having all the parameters nailed from ~300 feet on down. You’re done correcting for any errors by then and all the needles are centered on target and stationary. Except the altimeter.
Assuming you’ve got that squared away, it turns into a timing game. Which is greatly assisted by modern radar altimeters verbally counting down “50 … 40 … 30 … 20 … 10”.
For e.g. a 737, just before HAL starts to say “twenty”, gently raise the nose 2 degrees in 2 seconds while dragging the power to idle in about 4 seconds. Different airplanes have different start points and timing, but that’s the basic idea. If as you’re getting down there the cadence of the “50 40 30” is a little faster or slower than usual you can adjust early or late. But if it’s accelerating like “fifty .... forty … thirty .. tw” you need to be urgently going around before it finishes saying “enty”, lest you pound it on real good.
For real pilots getting real training, these rules of thumb are imparted by the books and the instructors in the sim. Such that they don’t need to be rediscovered by each pilot new to the airplane. For someone teaching themselves in MSFT flight simulator or such, there’s no such advantages. I suppose the various sim enthusiast message boards might have somebody who can teach the techniques for any given type, but it’s going to be challenging for a PC sim pilot to discover them on their own.
I had the same impression in the early part of my flight training – that we were descending into the runway at about a 45° angle! We ground-dwellers and car drivers are just not used to seeing what’s really a fairly gentle glide slope. You very quickly get used to it.
I had a few different instructors, including my dad. He took me up once in a 172. We had the plane trimmed and balanced to fly 80 mph, with my hands off the controls. I pushed the throttle in, and a strange thing happened. We didn’t speed up, we started climbing. I pulled the power back and we leveled off. Pulled the power off a little more and we descended; all at 80 mph.
In a way, the yoke and elevator trim control your speed, and the throttle makes you climb and descend.
I happened to see the supplement that gets added to a plane’s operating handbook when floats are installed (probably a 185 or 206). The recommendation for landing on glassy smooth water, when you can’t judge your height, was to set the plane up for a certain speed and rate of descent, and just wait. If you touch down with those parameters, you’ll be okay.
That’s what I was taught.
I worked with three different instructors over the time it took to get my license. Only one thought to teach it to me that way. I found it helpful, and wish someone had mentioned it sooner.
To get back to the subject of the thread, I had never had too much trouble landing. They weren’t all great, but never all that bad, either.