I can't get an answer.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

I have been trying to get a discussion going on height judgement during a landing on the other site in the flight training forum.

For some reason it seems there are no instructors there that are interested in the subject.

I wonder why?

[Colonel]

I'm pretty sure I've seen their students land  :))

Is every landing a glassy-water / landing-light-out-at-night landing now?

Close your eyes and hope for the best?

[Chuck Ellsworth]

Well some of them teach putting four fingers in front of you to find the level attitude and before you smash into the ground you assume that attitude close your eyes and wait for the airplane to contact the runway.

So maybe we are over thinking it by being able to accurately judge our height during the landing?

I think I will ask them if the most common misuse of the controls such as using the brakes to control taxi speed, slamming the throttle from taxi setting to full power on take off faster than the speed of light, climbing away from the runway in the roller coaster flight path chasing the airspeed and levelling off at circuit height and reducing power as soon as the airplane is in the level attitude is still common.

[Colonel]

I've always taught to put the aircraft in the landing attitude, six inches
above the runway, with the power all the way off so that the airspeed
bleeds off as fast as possible, lift decreases, and the aircraft lands itself.

[img width=500 height=306][/img]

I'm not sure people are very interesting in precision flying any more.  They
don't care what airspeed they have on final, and they don't care how high
they flare.  Weirdly, these are often the people looking for a greaser and
a right seat job in a large aircraft at 300TT.

[img width=500 height=375][/img]

That's my 19 year old son on my right wing.  Maybe pilots should try to
fly as well as a teenager that had such a crappy instructor, he's not eligible
to renew his instructor rating in Ontario Region?



That's how you land a fucking airplane.  Keep in mind that neither of those pilots
earn a living as a professional pilot - they bang bits for a living.

Try really, really hard, to fly as well as a couple of [u]fucking amateurs[/u]. 

Anyone that is arrogant enough to think that they should get paid a third of a million
dollars a year to fly an airplane for a few hours every month, let me know when you
can land a Pitts in formation with consistent fuselage overlap.

[img width=500 height=475][/img]

How quaint and trivial (above from the wiki for bit-banger).  Here's a little code burst:

[img width=377 height=500][/img]

Any Canadian pilot ought to be able to write that - you're all much brighter than I am,
I was told for half a century.

[Slick Goodlin]

I’m not sure I can get an answer either.  How [i]do[/i] you judge height for landing?  I just kind of pray and should have prayed a lot harder the other night.  Didn’t bend anything, just bruised my fragile ego.

[Colonel]

[quote]How do you judge height for landing?[/quote]

Just because you can't explain it, doesn't mean you can't do it.

Try to explain how you ride a bike.  Hell, explain how you walk.

Explain how you digest your dinner.

[mcrit]

Height to start round out?

TLAR (pronounced '[i]tee-lar[/i]') method).  [b]T[/b] hat[b] L[/b] ooks [b]A[/b] bout [b]R[/b] ight

[Rosco P Coltrane]

I'm not an instructor but hypothetically am I teaching on an A-320 or a DA-20? I only ask because they have different cockpit heights.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

For sure different airplanes have different cockpit heights therefore you learn to judge the wheel height from the surface based on what airplane you are flying.

[Rosco P Coltrane]

Ha, I knew it. Those instructors over there don't understand flying enough to ask the questions needed to answer your questions. What a bunch of buffoons.