 Welcome everyone. I'm Fred Kaiser and I'm your host here at the Fast Team National Resource Center, F.A. Production Studios at the Sun and Sun Fun Complex here at Lakeland, Florida. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this presentation and I'm going to invite you back for the next presentation as it is because the gentleman is going to be doing the one that follows this one. Our next presenter is the Chief Flight Instructor for the AOPA Safety Foundation. He's a former boring 767 captain and check airman for American Airlines. He's been an active CFI for more than 29 years with over 13,500 hours logged. He teaches regularly out of his home base, Frederick Merlin. He owns a CESTA 172 that he flies for both business and pleasure and he's a regular on the aviation speaking circuit appearing at of course here, Sun and Fun, AOPA Expo, local 99 groups and a member of the Civil Air Patrol. This topic is Mastering Takeoff and Landings and at this time I would like for you all to welcome JJ Greenway. Thank you very much Fred. You know it's funny one of the quirks I have in speaking is I always like to wear a sport coat when I get up on the stage. When you come to Sun and Fun there's only two people wandering around the ground with sport coats on. Fred's one of them so I always feel at home when I come here to to talk because I always know somebody in the building here since we have air conditioning we'll have a coat on. We have any, let's see I like to ask if we have any lawyers in the crowd first but I'm not going to do that. We have any non-flying spouses in the crowd. Oh good okay all right well you can appreciate this. I've been coming to Sun and Fun for a couple of years and I've only come with my wife just once and that was the first time we came to Sun and Fun and it was my birthday and my buddy Tom called me up the night before and he said hey for your birthday I want to take you to Sun and Fun in my new airplane and your wife will really enjoy it and my buddy Tom had just gotten a new airplane so he stopped by Frederick Maryland and loaded us on board and here's us on our way to Sun and Fun the first time my wife came to Sun and Fun with me and I sat back in that chair and I peaked up in the cockpit and I saw I didn't see an airspeed indicator I saw a Mach indicator and it was hovering right up around .9 Mach so we were going pretty fast I reckon and airplane was built by a guy named Bill, Bill Lear I guess it was somebody like that so my wife thought that's how everybody came to Sun and Fun so she was a little spoiled the first time around so the next year when it came time to go to Sun and Fun I was on my way down we've got a couple airplanes out in our hangar and we got all loaded up and she decided she wasn't going to come all the way to Sun and Fun in the J3 Cubs so I came by myself that year so since then she stayed at home unless my buddy Tom coughs up for another another ride in his Lyre 60 so that's just as well we got a lot a lot of business to conduct down here and I like walking around and getting my feet dusty out seeing all the new sights. A couple of things on the wings program if anyone wants wings credit for this there will be a gentleman circulating a clipboard and you can sign up for that and we'll get you all squared away with getting some wings credit for the course. Word for our airport support network and these folks are over in the AOPA tent if you haven't had a chance to visit them stop by basically what they do is they try to identify airports that are in danger of being closed down or airports in danger of having noise restrictions put up and AOPA tries to have eyes and ears and feet on the ground for every public use airport and private use airport if necessary in the United States and there's over 5,000 of them and so far we have about 2,000 volunteers in our network that just kind of let us know if they read something in the paper if they hear some encroachment on an airport they can let us know what's what's about to happen and then we can either send a legal team out or lean on them with our legislative affairs office in Washington DC if necessary and these are airports if you're a local person that are within 150 miles of Lakeland Florida airports that don't have a volunteer currently so if any of these airports are near and dear to any of you here in the crowd stop by our tent and visit our airport support network booth it's staff the whole time the tent is open and talk to the folks there or if you know of any airport that's about to undergo some encroachment that we may want to know about at AOPA that's what we do with your dues money we have any AOPA members in here good okay well it's big bang for the buck for $39 a year and that's just one of the many things that we do with in addition to the safety messages that we are just about to deliver to you let's talk about takeoffs and landings for a minute why all the talk about takeoffs and landings we always have heard that those are the most dangerous phases of flight not only for general aviation aircraft but for air carrier aircraft too and it's funny when you think about it why it is that way because these are things that we do every day when we you don't hear people saying I'm going to go out and practice my slow flight today people generally talk about practice and landings if they're a little bit rusty you don't even hear about people practice and takeoffs I guess that's by default if they're practicing landings they're practicing one takeoff for every landing but landings are the things that we focus on and this presentation is just on takeoffs and landings and some of the foibles associated with them and just a way to make them safer and ways to make them safer for each of us this isn't a new ground for us we covered this back in seven years ago in 2002 with ups and downs of takeoffs and landings another ASF presentation that we had and that was pretty successful we toured the country with it about 15,000 pilots saw it but we haven't really made much of a dent takeoffs and landing accidents as you can see from the statistics statistics that we track have remained fairly constant probably if anything just hovering with the amount of air traffic there's been in general aviation so we thought we'd go at it again maybe come at it from a different standpoint and hopefully we can have some results as we look at each year's statistics hopefully we'll make some dents in these things and you know that's exactly what we do with the air safety foundation we track the the highest killer items the things that more pilots are getting in trouble with and we design our safety message to target that one that we did a while back was the fuel exhaustion the fuel starvation message and we actually think we can look at statistics and think that we've made a dent in that and if you've seen any of our public service announcements on that some of them are kind of humorous but they do get the message across we're trying to do the same thing with takeoffs and landings here we are witness to some of the most expert flying in the world right outside here on this runway we have people doing all of these things all of these things are things that we are doing as regular old non-air show pilots every time making a takeoff or making a landing and when you think of what's going on at the air show out here you have people doing every single thing that we're doing except in that very last one using skills that he rode over time these pilots out here are flying a little bit more than the 40 to 50 hour average per year that we've tracked that general aviation pilots are flying these pilots are flying several hundred hours a year and doing these routines over and over and over again and that's why they're so good and that's why we pay big money to get in the gate and watch them but think about it think about the the medium performance or low performance airplanes that you and I fly and think of trying to do some of the things that these ladies and gentlemen out here are doing with these airplanes and you see why takeoffs and landings remains a fairly a fairly high cause of not only fatalities but just accidents in general in general aviation we talk a lot about simulation and flying we can't completely simulate the exact finesse of landing particularly takeoffs a little bit easier there's a lot of book learning we can do we need to know speeds for airplanes we need to know configurations for airplanes but we really need to learn the feel of it and that last little bit of feel is what you're going to have to get in the air I can only tell you so much the book study helps a little bit we've all heard what goes up must come down I know my father used to tell me that my mother was a little disconcerved I started learning to fly when I was 15 and and he said don't worry about what goes up must come down but my mother didn't like that too well there's a safety foundation we say what goes down must be able to go back up again with one caveat and that's without the help of a crane so we'll review the book learning the science of it and like I said that's just basic there's only a few things we can learn we'll delve a little bit into the the arc the seat of the pants some of the things that we run across that we have to learn as we're undergoing instruction not only primary instruction takeoffs and landings but as we move on and transition into more complex airplanes bigger airplanes and getting checked checked out in airplanes we aren't normally used to flying airplanes that we may not be flying a lot of the time we have any tail wheel pilots in here besides me good okay well we're not going to be preaching so much to tail wheel pilots there's a few things that are crossover in here when we talk about the soft field short field some of those issues are a little bit different but that's okay you all that fly tail wheels have a pretty good idea know what to do with your feet anyway but not that you're not without a few of your own issues if you read the national transportation safety board in the 50s when we were trying to go from conventional gear to tricycle gear that was a real good idea for safety reasons but you notice that tail wheel aircraft are involved in a lot of runway excursions shall we say and the national transportation safety board database so there's a few problems in the tail wheel industry still as far as keeping the airplane lined up with the runway but a few things in here for tail wheel pilots too so don't go away yet let's jump into the takeoffs an excerpt from the diagnostic manual of aviation abnormalities is hyper-applicatus tow brake itis condition resulting from high foot placement on the rudder pedals and we've never done that as uh the more decades i get into being a cfi when i'm flying with an initial student that's a little bit nervous that's one thing i like to lean down and check and that is uh feet on the brakes and uh seems like every once in a while i don't check and i get caught with an airplane that doesn't seem to be accelerating very rapidly and i look down and sure enough somebody's toes are on the brakes or heels are on the brakes in the case of heel brakes in the in the j3 cub so that's one thing you're going to want to make sure if you're an instructor to continue to check and if you're flying yourself make sure the case of the nerves doesn't have you with your toes just up a little bit on the brakes and jump it into takeoffs how many times has somebody really said to you nice landing hopefully every time i don't get that every time but no one it really does say nice takeoff but there is every bit as much finesse knowledge and skill involved in a takeoff as there is in a landing it just works better most of the time you think about it you're at uh you're at a very high angle of attack the highest angle of attack you're probably going to reach during the flight and obviously at a very low airspeed we'll look later about the increasing energy but think about a crosswind takeoff you're taking off with aileron deflected into the wind that would be a turn and as you gain speed of course you are reducing your deflection so the energy is continually changing and obviously you're operating your engine probably at the highest level you're going to be operating your engine during the flight so your engine's at its highest stress those of us live in cold weather climates up in the northern latitudes engines at the highest stress at a very cold temperature maybe the engine is not real warm so you're really asking a lot of your engine in this situation here's the problem though with takeoffs versus landings the lethality index for takeoffs takeoff accidents are 10 times more deadly according to the 06 statistics which we've completely compiled any ideas why takeoffs are more deadly than landings increasing speed that's a good one low altitude oh you're uh yeah you you're obviously at the low altitude for for taking off anything else closer to gross weight closer to gross weight that's a big one and lethality you're probably yeah to landing again right right yeah so your your configuration so so and you're full of fuel too and as far as the lethality index if something goes wrong you've got a lot of stuff that burns real fast real close to you too so all these things contribute to to the takeoff accidents being far more dangerous than than a landing accident we'll look at some of the some of the basic techniques and look at some of the areas that have gotten some people in trouble going into the into the takeoffs one thing that I carry over from that we in general aviation got from the airline world is is the takeoff briefing and really all the takeoff briefing is just just a preparation just to put your brain in the in a mindset of what you're going to do if something goes wrong gentlemen mention about it if you have an engine failure on takeoff and you only have one engine you've got to think of something to do right away right away and lower the nose and and go back into the landing mode so a takeoff briefing if you're by yourself it's okay to talk to yourself just not okay to answer yourself right it's okay to talk to yourself if you're by yourself or if you have a non-flying passenger maybe explain what you're doing but I like to kind of rehearse that maybe if I have my engine fail prior to thousand feet above the ground maybe I'll go straight ahead and land or if it's above a thousand feet above the ground I will turn back and try to land where I took off from I try to look and make sure there's no propane farms off the end of the runway if I can see him or puppy stores or school yards or anything like that things that things that might get me in trouble or hurt me or alarm the media if I landed on it so it's a good idea to familiarize yourself I know some of my younger students that are better with computers than I am are getting real good about using Google Earth to look at the takeoff zone and see all the obstacles that are in it and with an unfamiliar airport that's a great idea so the pre takeoff briefing for yourself and if you have two pilots in the cockpit it's even better yet so both pilots understand what's going on it's a good idea just to familiarize yourself so there's no surprises if something does go wrong a couple of things to watch door latches if you've stopped by and if you're an AOPA member then of course you're all in the running for that that nice new Cirrus or nearly new Cirrus that we have down there that we're going to give away but I was flying a Cirrus the other day and there was a little bit of a door latch problem and the door came open on takeoff and that was a little bit of a surprise and I was IFR and we came back and landed and that was something I hadn't really thought of happening because I was kind of new to the Cirrus and and I hadn't really briefed myself and my takeoff briefing what I was going to do but word of the wise on that that's one thing that can interrupt a takeoff control locks that's one thing on this type of control lock we have in the picture here this has my control lock it's real easy to see real difficult to take off and leave that control lock in place but I had one happen to a gentleman that's in my hangar row the other day and he sheepishly told me about it thinking maybe I could pass the message on in a safety seminar but he was in an aviat husky his husky and it was real windy the time before and he tied the stick the rear stick with the seatbelt and that was how he kept the controls from blowing around and he said he kind of forgot about it went home and came back next weekend and went flying and he admitted that when he taxied out he didn't really do a full control check and when it came time to take off he pushed the stick forward and of course the rear stick was securely wrapped with the rear seatbelt and no harm no foul he wasn't moving at all but all of a sudden he realized he didn't have any forward stick authority so if I always kind of secretly held in the back of my mind who could be so stupid as to take off with a control lock in well sounds real easy because I've done that before in in a cub and a husky and that's secure a stick with a seatbelt not a real good idea if it's something you can forget about obstructions in the area trees and buildings of course you get disrupted wind flow something to look around before you start your takeoff roll maybe halfway down the runway is an obstruction and if you have a crosswind you're going to get some disturbed air from that obstruction just one more thing you can prep yourself on of course foot placement we talked about that or heel placement in the case of brakes make sure everything is clear and the winds now we get reported winds and we get wind gusts and you notice when we talked about book learning we talked about maximum demonstrated crosswind component that's for landing you always see that in the landing section what's the most crosswind this airplane will take on landing is what we always try to think to ourselves but you ever think about takeoffs there's no there's no maximum demonstrated crosswind component that you think applies to takeoff I think we have to as as safe pilots I think we have to apply some common censure though I think if it's too strong to land it's probably too strong to take off I think we can it's safe for us to make that assumption in our pilot operating handbooks so that gust I like to include that gust because what is the definition of gust when the when Lakeland tower says the wind is 360 at 12 gusting 15 is that an instantaneous gust just like that or is that a whoosh that builds up to 15 and then abates there's no real definition of gust when they give you gust winds so whatever the wind is plus the gust I like to consider that the wind and I think that's fair as far as trying to operate safely and keep the airplane within the bounds of what it will do with the controls that you have crosswinds we talked about ailerons into the wind and rolling out gradually let's just look and take a quick look there's no audio on this but just take a quick look at a crosswind takeoff still weather vading into the wind you see that there's no aileron into the wind on that no aileron at all you saw and now the airplane crabs into the wind as it takes off so you saw the rudder inputs and holding the airplane on the ground all the way until until flying speed is attained and then a very positive lift off a couple more things to watch terrain and this is another thing that in part 91 we're not required to watch the airlines are real big on something they call second segment climb so the airlines compute how long it's going to take to get off the ground and then they make you add 40 or 60 percent to that and then after you get off the ground the airlines then want the operators to compute the second segment climb and that's all the terrain that's going to be in the climb out up to a specific altitude so they figure that very carefully so taking off in an airport take the one in this picture here obviously your second segment climb or your climb after takeoff is going to be something that is going to be a factor unless you have an airplane that could climb over it very well most of the current pilot operating handbooks have information in there for takeoff distances and landing distances on hard dry surfaces and then on grass but it doesn't say anything about tall grass and I have a feeling that those pilot operating handbook figures that you have for grass were probably computed on something that looks a lot like a putting green it's going to be pretty hard grass it's going to be pretty short grass it's going to be dry grass and that's how those figures come up and you'll see a caveat in the takeoff section or landing section it'll say add 10 percent to take off roll for dry grass surfaces but tall grass is one that you're really on your own if you're venturing into that area on landing as far as getting good performance rough surfaces course landing on sandbars or what have you that's another one that no book figures are published for most of the conventional airplanes that we're flying another thing too that we can't really plan for and we've had a few accidents in the last couple of years on the in some coastal cities here in Florida and that is encountering instrument conditions or dark conditions right after takeoff and that's something that you can look around and see if you're taking off out over the water particularly out over the gulf face and west at night you really have no horizon at all taking off if you're a VFR only pilot that can be a real surprise sadly enough one of the accidents that happened most recently on the west coast of Florida highly experienced pilot took off with a lot of Navy and civilian time too and it was VFR and IMC the gentleman just lost control of the airplane and I honestly don't think taking off out of a brightly lit airport with city all around he was faced west I honestly think it just caught him by surprise no abnormalities with the airplane and the airplane went into the into the water a loss of a completely good airplane and according to the national transportation safety board the pilot had just really not had the situational awareness to realize that it was going to be completely black outside the windshield after takeoff density altitude is another one and of course we're coming up on the season where we get it we're here in Florida operating pretty close to sea level but as soon as we venture out into the mountain west during the summertime we get density altitudes that are up eight nine thousand feet pretty common and I don't know about what you fly but in my Cessna 172 that was built back when I was in the fifth grade it doesn't do too well at density altitudes of eight or nine thousand feet I had the privilege a couple years ago flying down in New Guinea in Indonesia with some of the missionary pilots from Mission Aviation Fellowship a very tightly run organization it's obviously foreign overseas it's not governed by FAA part 91 FAR part 91 it's governed by the local regulations but they had a very strict procedure and we were operating out of some very high mountain airports over five thousand feet elevation temperature was around 100 degrees and I got invited to go on a trip and they said we'll meet us at the airport about 3 30 in the morning and I thought well that was a lot of time to meet at the airport well turned out they wanted me to help them load concrete block onto this airplane so we got all that done we took off about 4 30 and it was still real dark this is right on the equator south of Guam and we flew for about an hour or so finally the sun came up and I finally had the courage to ask why on earth are we up so early and they said if we don't get in and out of this strip by 8 30 in the morning we can't do it and I said well who said and he said well that's just what we figured out is a safe way to do it and sure enough we landed a strip at about 5500 feet at about 7 30 in the morning and it's 5500 feet above sea level and the density altitude was computed around 9000 feet and we were in a Cessna 208 caravan and we did get in and we did get out but judging by the margins I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do that in the middle of the day and judging by all the jungle around I certainly wouldn't want to spend the night up there either so some hard fast rules like that keep an organization like that safe and there's really no reason why we can't do the same for ourselves not maybe make out an operating manual for ourselves like some of these organizations do but just a little rule of thumb that you have maybe your own personal tenant that you won't violate and that is maybe not operate over density altitudes that are more than 3000 feet or 5000 feet whatever the comfort level of you are with your airplane's performance is really all it is to keep safe we have about a dozen density altitude accidents per year in general aviation and since I've been tracking them for several years I've never seen one that just would have happened it looks to me like every time it happens a pilot tries to push it a pilot tries to go a little bit too far let's look at a density altitude on takeoff and this one just be happened to be captured by a camera crew from a local tv station we have an 836 bonanza in northern california renter palace vertus I think takes off does that look like a pretty normal takeoff so far we're on the center line can't see how much runway is left and let's take a look at some of the nuts and bolts of the takeoff though it was a 36 bonanza there's six seats in the bonanza normally anyone fly the 836 besides myself I came down here in 836 good you have all six seats in yours you do okay who else flies an 836 do you load them all up regularly no okay good we uh the ALPA we have a bonanza we use for business travel we have actually one of the six seats is taken out because we figured it would be very very rare for us to load all those seats so four adults in the bonanza very capable airplane but it won't take six adults the baggage when the ntsb offloaded the baggage and waited it came to 271 pounds they dreamed out 60 gallons of fuel but some fuel had already leaked out so it may have been up near its total of 72 gallons of fuel temperature was 107 degrees on the awas at a nearby airport you notice that was an asphalt runway and course black tends to absorb heat so it was estimated by the fire department that came to the scene that the temperature over the runway might have been as much as 115 degrees so that's kind of off the charts for the beachcraft bonanza let's take a look at the rest of the accident we get off the ground and we're climbing at a reasonable speed which starts to get off a little bit and decrease a little bit just prior to impact the pilot pulled back the the throttle when he realized that he was having a problem and and the airplane hit the ground and cart wheeled two lives were lost in that accident a couple injuries as well and the ntsb looked at it very carefully and there was a couple of assumptions that they made but either making the assumptions conservatively or otherwise the runway was about 4,000 feet it either needed or the runway is 4,050 it either needed 4,020 or 4,100 it was somewhere in there but it was so close there was just very little margin and that's putting a lot of trust in the book figures of the airplane that's putting a lot of trust in the performance capability of the airplane particularly not a brand new airplane that you're actually developing the the horsepower that it takes when you see something going wrong and you're going to abort the takeoff obviously aborting the takeoff at a slow speed is a is a heck of a lot better than aborting the takeoff at a high speed your stop distance quadruples as your speed doubles so think about the all the things that you're going to abort a takeoff for as you're rolling down the runway you might abort the takeoff for an open door at a slow speed but if you're at a high speed and you don't have very much runway left and if your airplane will fly with an open door which most air general aviation airplanes that we fly will there might not be as much reason to abort that takeoff at a very high speed my my initial training flying flying the 727 at American Airlines I was 26 years old and had a full head of hair and thought I was doing pretty good flying the 727 from the right seat and so the captain said to me so well why don't you give the takeoff briefing so I started down the takeoff briefing and I said well if if anything happens prior to prior to us taking off then we will abort the takeoff and if it happens after then we'll come back and land and he said really he's a really if anything happens we'll abort the takeoff he said how about that cup of coffee have other falls down into your kid bag your flight bag he said you're going to abort the takeoff for that so that got me to thinking early on in my career that it's really got to be important if I'm going to abort the takeoff at the very last minute prior to lifting off especially on a runway that's short where I really don't have very many options from the for single engineer planes you accelerate stop distance is not something that's published but it's something you can think about and think about how long it takes you to accelerate how long it's going to take you to make a decision to stop and then how long it's going to take you to stop and that would be your balanced field length it's called in in multi-engine flying and that's accelerate think about stopping and stop and you know part 121 airline operations actually build in in time of indecision you see the yellow line on the chart there the reaction time and when something bad happens in an airliner 140 knots on the runway the FAA realizes that we're all not Superman we're all not Tom Cruz it's going to take us a couple of seconds to think geez that's pretty bad I'm going to stop and then finally pulling the throttles back initiating maximum braking maybe thrust reverse two if that's available and stopping the airplane and that's assuming an intact airplane where we don't have tires that are brakes that have failed and tires that have failed so something to think about a balanced field length in a single engineer plane do you have room to do all those things so we compute our ground roll distance to the rotation speed in a couple of seconds at the rotation speed the landing ground roll to come up with a total distance for accelerate stop talked about differences between tailwheel aircraft and tricycle gear aircraft of course and I did have to throw a picture of my favorite airplane in here the aviado husky even though that's a tailwheel airplane so these short field soft field are our tricycle gear techniques of course and if you've taken a practical test for the private pilot practical of course recently for your soft field takeoff that's one no go item that the examiner will down you on if you're taking a private pilot check ride and that is soft field rolling onto the runway not stopping and going right into the soft field takeoff configuration that is full back elevator takeoff remaining gout ground effect and climb at either vx or vy we talked about the ability for your engine to develop the maximum power or the rated horsepower I don't know about your what you fly but I know that my 35 year old engine that hasn't had the the overhaul because it's fairly low time probably is not developing the 150 horsepower that Cessna said it was developing back when it was delivered brand new in 1973 so we need to give our pilot operating handbooks just a look at them just with a little bit of a jaundice to eye if you will you're not going to get book figures but what kind of figures you're going to get well at the air safety foundation we try to come up with some easy rules of thumb so we don't have to do the the complicated math but we like to add 50 percent to the distance over 50 foot obstacles so if the pilot operating handbook says we need 1200 feet figure 1800 feet most the runways that we operate off of are not going to be shorter than 2000 feet when you think about it so if you build yourself a little slack in on the takeoff performance data you're building yourself in just that much more safety and going back to the beginning with the safety statistics we need to build that little bit more safety in because a lot of these accidents are pilots trying to operate their airplanes in very maximum configuration if we could have the sound from Hal in the control room up there please we'll jump into landings that's particularly a short finalitis rapid erratic control movements during takeoffs and landings and if the cfi is present accompanied by loud vocalizations take over your airplane let's take a look at some landings here i'd like to say that no actual airplanes were harmed in the production of this video but i would feel on that last one there was some quality time spent with an a and p mechanic after that but uh i don't know if you reckon anyone ever been to our a opa flying up in frederick in uh in june of every year we used to have it we're not having it this year but uh we were looking for some footage and we decided when we had flying in to go out and film all of our guests flying in one day that's where we got a lot of that footage there from that sesna 182 that was doing the nosewheel dance there i got to thinking afterwards that probably wasn't very nice to invite all of our friends over and then take pictures of them landing so we redacted the tail numbers how's that but hopefully it's a good learning experience but um we saw we saw landings there that were kind of ugly that might have resulted in some some damage to the airplane particularly landing on the nose that's a no no but landing is not a beauty contest and uh it's not a good idea to really try to finesse it if you're using up too much runway if you're just trying to make it good for the sake of being good anybody made a bad landing before never made a bad landing oh okay all right all right let me tell you about one of my bad and i'm not talking about something that's that goes in the ntsb database i'm just talking about a really bad landing um that that first day i was talking about learning to fly uh learning to fly the 727 i uh is my sixth landing and my first five were perfect i thought i had it down and on the sixth one it was blowing there was a washington national airport washington dc and it was march the wind was 26 knots and it was from about 50 degrees and well within the capability of the airplane and we hit so hard that we were in the air which is hard to do in a 727 because you have spoilers so we hit that hard we were in the air and somebody keyed the mic there's a long line of eastern airlines airplanes those when eastern was still in business so some wise guy keyed the mic and said oh boy when we were still in the air i remember that about it and when we came down the second time um we came down good and hard and the captain said well we'll leave the cockpit door closed when we get to the gate so no one will see who's in here so i thought that was a good idea it was a little trick i learned used a lot later on my later on in my career used that trick a few times for myself and for co-pilots that were acting like i was that day and uh finally after all the people were off the mechanic knocked on the door and he said uh looks like the rubber jungle back here and i didn't know what that meant well you know all those rubber oxygen masks that hang down well they'll come down if uh the pressure is not enough and they need to be but did you know if he hit really hard they can come down so i ask again has anyone ever had a bad landing got any more hands okay okay we've got a couple more hands all right come back in a year if i ask that i'll get more hands yet so we're gonna have bad landings that don't hurt the airplane i learned how to repack oxygen masks that day it's not that hard just wind up the little cord with the pencil and stuff it in there and close the lid so after that i thought maybe the latches were weak on those little doors i'm not sure but it was a pretty hard landing so um but like i said the bad ones are usually a lot worse feeling than they are worse looking but think of all we're trying to do with landing here we're trying to get from uh not just from the traffic pattern but from our cruise altitude all the way down to the ground we want to remain controlled all the time and we don't want to be near the outer limits of our performance think about takeoffs we're near the outer limits of our performance but we want to maintain a speed above stall speed all the way down maybe a full stall landing is within your your uh book of tricks but um and you want to use a reasonable amount of runway i flew with uh phil boyer just before he retired and i know some of you probably met phil and he's kind of a hard guy to get to know and i never really knew him all that well the whole time i worked there but i flew with him a couple times and he had to go pick up one of his airplanes up in pennsylvania and i flew him up there in arbananza and i was hell bent and determined to make a good landing with uh with phil on board so he was sitting there not saying anything and we landed up in Lancaster pennsylvania it was a seven thousand foot runway and i think i probably used about two thousand of it trying to finesse the landing and we finally landed and i didn't want to put the brakes on and we rolled through the intersection it was airport we've both been to before and i thought wow that's a lot of runway we used and phil looked around he says boy i've never been down here before i think that was a nice way of phil telling me that i used up a lot more runway than i needed to and when i turn around and look back at six of the seven thousand feet runway and realize that a beachcraft a-36 bonanza probably needs about a thousand feet i guess i was trying to do a little bit too good a job finessing it and even so wasn't that good of a landing so figure you pay federal income tax you own all that runway right so uh a greaser when someone tells you good landing i like to take that with a grain of salt if someone that really knows how to land an airplane tells me good landing i'll take that as a compliment if it's my my kids or my grandmother that tells me it's a good land they don't know a whole lot about landing so maybe it was a bad landing but it just happened to be real good at touchdown that's what i was used to making a little bit perturbed about flying international flight you fly for 15 hours on a flight from new york to uh to bonus iris and uh you get there and you land you have a bad landing and the customers of passengers always judge that entire flight by that last couple of seconds so you might have navigated through the airspace of of 27 different countries you're talking a couple different languages you stayed up all night you drank 15 cups of coffee you make one bad landing and they get off and they say oh man last time we rode on delta it was better than that so so uh sometimes sometimes you just have to do the safe thing fly the airplane like you're taught to fly it fly it by the book you might get a thumper out of it but it's a safe landing um if if you really want to start an argument um talk about republicans or democrats and uh you can also talk about crosswind landings you're gonna go wing low on a crosswind landing or you're gonna go crab on a crosswind landing and then there's some people are gonna do the combinations so a lot of different techniques if you want to talk about crosswind landing techniques i'll probably spend the rest of the afternoon talking about them with you if i had time uh but there's a few basic things that we have to have in our landings um the airplane has to be lined up with a runway and uh you know that's one thing i always i sometimes i i get a little impatient with students sometimes and i am an active flight instructor i have three students right now i always my wife doesn't let me have more because i do work full time at a opa but i always try to keep three students so i have somebody to talk about when i'm doing safety seminars i think some of them were in here too by the way oh this will be good so um i always wonder why on earth are you lined up with the edge of the runway and i think that to myself and i try not to say it because it's not a good idea to talk to students like that when you're a flight instructor and if you've ever had your flight instructor talk to you like that you can ask him not to but that's what i think sometimes i think why on earth are you lined up with the edge of the runway and uh i i think that a student doesn't have a good reason to do that well i learned to fly that cirrus down there um when we uh give it away to one of you when you win it um myself or editor dav Hirschman we're going to fly it to your location we're going to give you your 10 hours of factory training because we're both factory instructors now and uh and then sign you off and give it to you so get ready for that it's in february so we had to go through cirrus training uh with a cirrus factory instructor so i'd never flown a cirrus before so there i was and it was a little bit windy that's my excuse and uh instructors and i thought i was doing pretty good i was lined up with a runway that i always line up on i teach on that runway frederick runway two three and uh he said he said why on earth are you lined up with the edge of the runway and you know if that was after 29 years of instructing i thought it took me that long to learn why students are lining up with the edge of the runway i was distracted i had so many other things to do i was trying to keep my airspeed right on i was trying to keep my uh my configuration just right and sure enough i looked when he said that i had to laugh because i said to him and he was just he was a kid uh he had all his hair and and uh and i said you sound like me and he said why are you lined up with the edge of the runway so horizontal alignment that's that's the first thing um vertical alignment of course we have good vertical guidance we have um approach slope indicators of pappy or the vassie or we have electronic guidance in the cockpit so there's really no reason uh in most the airplanes we fly to not have our vertical alignment and our longitudinal alignment that is at the time of touchdown particularly in tailwheel airplanes unless you want the round end to be swapped around with a pointy end longitudinal alignment is very very important it's uncomfortable to touch down in the crab in a tricycle gear airplane so longitudinal alignment is very important as well airspeed control is uh is the final icing on the cake if you have all of those taken care of i'm not going to guarantee a good landing but i'm going to guarantee a pretty safe landing and most of the time it'll be a landing that you might be proud of but it's not going to be a landing that's going to be uh on the evening news or above the fold in uh in usa today think back if you've ever had a bad landing some of the things that uh that that might have caused it and i've thought back a lot of times about that landing where i dropped all those rows of oxygen masks i said i was blaming it on the wind that's i can't really go there because the wind was within limits blaming on my inexperience maybe that might have but uh i hadn't really had my airspeed under control i was jockeying with the throttles all the way down in the wind and my general inexperience led to me making a bad landing and the captain who is training me and his wisdom let me make that bad landing and it taught me a lot of good lessons so i still remember it after 20 plus 25 years so uh all the way from cruise we're thinking about that um all the way down are we going to be in a position for that last couple of uh minutes on the approach to be stabilized on the approach atc request last minute we have parallel runways here i love to help out atc when i can but if i'm at 300 feet and they say hey can you slide slide over and take the other runway if i can safely do it i will i can say i love to accommodate atc request but if i can't safely do it uh unable is is a perfectly acceptable response to an atc request if i can't safely do it you don't get a hero medal if you try to do it and then have a problem on landing uh just the opposite because you'll probably be blocking a runway if you have a problem the air traffic controllers won't be so uh won't be so happy with it traffic issues uh at a field um you may uh have non radio airplanes in the pattern in a non-towered field and that's something that those pop up ahead of you and all of a sudden you have a change of plans um abnormal weather for most of us to fly vfr that might just be winds um if you fly ifr though um if you've done a really really low visibility approach and i'm talking about visibility a half mile category one i ls minimums down to 1800 r v r you see a different sight picture when you break out at minimums you see a completely different sight picture with uh with 2000 feet of r v r than you do on a clear day and if you've never actually done that for the first time i will tell you right now exactly what will happen when you break out on a really low visibility approach and you see the runway you will go high on the glide slope everybody does you'll do it in a simulator you'll do it in the real airplane and unless you've braced yourself told yourself that when i break out i'm going to keep following the glide slope down or i'm going to keep my descent rate at the same rate natural to human tendency as soon as you see something that low that you're close to and you're seeing it for the first time you're going to pull back a little bit and every time you'll go high it's okay if it's a 10 000 foot runway you got plenty but uh recently did an approach i ls approach to a 3200 foot runway up in uh promise town uh i'm sorry at the end of cape cod up there it's not promise town i forgot what it was but it amazed me there was an i ls that we shot down to minimums on a 3200 foot runway and that wasn't a whole lot to play with and i was glad that i knew not to pull if you race nascar or if you ride horses in the ring you know about the word collected a stabilized approach the airplane is collected it's everything stabilized for the last you say the number the airlines and why they have such a good safety record all require a thousand foot stabilization that's how they get good insurance rates and that's why the airline safety record is is what it is so at a thousand feet the airplanes completely configured flaps and gear the airspeed is approach speed within 10 knots of approach speed plus 10 not minus 10 and so then from that point on down at a thousand feet above the ground all the way down the airplane is stabilized and there's no surprises no turns no nothing we don't have that luxury in our ga operations we're flying a pattern sometimes we're turning on the final approach of 400 feet 500 feet in a pattern but uh something to think about is is try to make our approaches as stabilized as possible instrument approaches this is one thing that uh we're all law abiding tax paying uh far abiding citizens and it's really easy to get in trouble and i want to show you an approach chart i just picked one out uh still had one in this presentation from the west coast and you can't read the whole thing and that doesn't matter but uh if you look down at the bottom there the um minimum descent altitude on this non precision approach gps approach to runway 34 the minimum descent altitude is about 700 feet above the ground well if you look very closely at the approach and i'll uh cursor up to it look very closely at the approach that's the missed approach point right there that the arrow is pointing to and at that point which is right over the runway you are at 700 feet on the approach like i said you abide by the rules you do everything you're supposed to do uh you are supposed to touch down in the touchdown zone this runway is 3500 feet long i think um and there you are at 700 feet over the threshold of the runway there is really no good safe way to get down i know what i'm going to try to do is i'm going to try to pull the throttle all the way back and chop it and drop it um but that's really not a safe way to make an approach if that runway was wet it's a pretty good chance any airplane i fly including a j3 cub is not going to come down from 700 feet and land on the remaining runway safely some of the shapes you see that you get used to these are not things you memorize these are things that as you've been flying you just already know this the different shapes of being high low and just right and you recognize those these are not things like i say that you study in books or put on index cards and look at but um that's that's the shape that you're seeing this runway looks just about right looking out the windshield just that shape forward slips can your airplane do them if it can't do a forward slip probably there's a placard that says uh no slips or no slips with flaps extended or no slips with uh less than quarter tanks of fuel or various uh restrictions on slips good way to get down uh if you need to get down in a hurry or if you're an airplane that doesn't have flaps it's uh about the only way to get down in a hurry uh if you need to um i've slipped airplanes all the way up to the the size of um ones that i probably shouldn't have been slipping and they're all pretty aerodynamic and they all slip pretty well you don't have to have a full slip as you transition into it that's a little uncomfortable but a partial slip will increase your descent rate just as well we call it the goldilocks principle with airspeed though as we're trying to dissipate airspeed on final not too cold not too hot but just right speaking of too hot if we could have a bit of volume upstairs in the control room and we'll take a look at the moony anyone flow that flown the jk or s r series of the moony very clean airplane very clean wing and if it's down near the ground that wasn't staged i promise we're out shooting some footage in north carolina and somebody said hey here comes a moony and he looks kind of hot and the cameraman turned around and got that whole thing i thought that was pretty good uh airspeed control and then and that's one thing about being stabilized um and of course some of those bad landings result from you having your landing uh at five feet above the runway maybe you thought the runway was uh five feet higher or last time you were there it was five feet higher that's your excuse and the pitch control depth perception is something that really gets us and notice how in your nighttime flying your landings can be completely different because you're using a completely different set of cues out in your peripheral vision that's why far part 91 requires currency uh or part 61 requires night currency because you're using a whole different set of skills for night landing that affects your depth perception and your pitch control picture of uh of firewall damage if you look really closely on that airplane but uh think we talk about landing gear we talk about the landing gear tires we talk about main landing gear um try not to think of your nose gear as part of your landing gear because if you're landing on the nose gear like we saw earlier you're probably going to be spending some quality shop time yourself and uh straighten out a bent firewall on some of these airplanes that involves removing the engine too is a very expensive process wing position and the clean the cleanliness of the airplane the aerodynamic cleanliness of course in the middle of the j3 cub you pull the throttle back you've got gear struts you've got two sets of wing struts you've got tail struts you've got struts everywhere you look on an airplane like that and uh it will slow down when you pull the throttle back take a look at the moony on the bottom of the serous on the top and the aerodynamic cleanness when you pull the throttle back as you saw with the moony the airplane is going to do a lot of floating this was an actual picture that we took that day of the fly in that you saw those pictures of the airplane doing some skidding and somebody flat spotted a tire airplane landed a little fast no big deal but we just happened to look over and saw a bunch of people gathered around one of those airplanes that landed and uh decided we'd take a snap a picture of it when they weren't looking that crosswind component chart that we talked about and we talked about learning some of the numbers uh getting the book knowledge as opposed to getting the seat of the pants knowledge that crosswind component was put there for a reason um that crosswind component chart was made up by some very experienced pilots that had a lot of time in the airplane and they found the very most crosswind that they could find maybe the airplane will take more they just couldn't find more that day but they found as much uh crosswind as they could find and they found out about how much rudder they had to counteract with uh to keep the airplane going straight down the runway to keep the longitudinal access the airplane aligned with the center line they computed that and when they got in a condition where they actually ran out of rudder and were touching down in a crab then they took that number uh the the maximum crosswind component is the speed that they keep the airplane rolling straight down the runway so that was not just uh just pulled out of a computer that was something that's the demonstrated crosswind component which means that somebody actually demonstrated somebody that like i say that was really really good at it um completely okay to touch down on the upwind wheel in a crosswind because you remember you're holding that wing down into the wind and obviously essential to point the rudder i use the rudder to point the nose down the runway particularly in a tailwheel airplane but definitely in a tricycle gear airplane too getting into your uh some more of the book knowledge most of your pilot operating handbooks most of them i'll say not all of them in a crosswind call for the minimum amount of flaps for the runway length in a short field that's one place that it doesn't say in the book that you're going to run into some problems but in a short field if it says use the minimum amount of flaps for a crosswind but yet it says short field use maximum flaps you're not going to get your book figure in a case like that so that's one place where we need to use our uh common pilot sense uh to get us uh to keep us out of trouble one more thing like discussed with takeoffs with uh long grass or wet grass um there's no charts for frost on grass or ice on grass uh no charts for standing water some of the airlines have charts for standing water and it costs a lot to make those demonstrations but we really don't have much information on that so hydroplaning can occur at about the speeds of touchdown in most of the airplanes that we fly about 50 uh 50 to 60 knots runway slope is another big one in general we don't take off uphill but there are exceptions to that and i've found that the very best information on this not only in the airport facilities directory but those old guys that you always see sitting around on porches around the airport uh or in the mountain strips around the campsites that's usually your best source of information is people that are local at the airport that can give you the do's and don'ts and usually it's takeoff downhill and land uphill get a fair amount of accents with uh go around mistakes and people forgetting that when they go around not only do they have to push that throttle in but that right foot has to go in as well we had a pretty high profile mistake with a uh go around mistake with a columbia 350 uh up in north carolina at this strip here the airplane touched down about midfield a little fast and uh at that point attempted to do a go around that was not coordinated very well with the rudder the airplane veered off the runway and hit several other other airplanes parked right next to the runway in the parking lot in the parking area fairly experienced pilot but very low time in type in the airplane it was a new airplane and the ntsb report listed this is just an improperly handled go around nothing wrong with the airplane getting up into the mountain strips uh we call it special cruise certification with the airlines but uh some strips uh you might want to try going into with somebody that's been there before prior to trying it by yourself airport facilities directory or our aop a directory has some good tips on some of these things and once again the local procedure just wrapping up a couple of the mandatory things like we talked about before the alignment not only horizontal and vertical but uh longitudinal and airspeed your currency what you used to be able to do you might not be able to do right now and you're in control of the airplane not the airplanes in control of you if it ever crosses your mind that you might need to go around pretty good chance that you do need to go around if we could have some volume right here at the end please from the control room on first line support groups are becoming an increasingly common method of long term treatment for addiction and are even popping up for some less familiar conditions let's eavesdrop on a group session for pilots having trouble landing their airplanes everyone we have a new attendee here today scott would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself hi my name is scott and i have a landing problem well at first i didn't think it was a big deal you know a few extra knots on final here and there and missing a taxi we turn off once in a while it's no biggie right i guess i was just fooling myself until the day i finally admitted that i was that i was addicted to speed i took my little girl up for a ride and we came back into land and we were floating down the runway in ground effect like normal and she looks up at me big brown eyes and she says daddy when are we gonna land yeah i just lost it then and there and i promised her that daddy was going to get some help and she would never have to worry about not landing again there is nothing to be ashamed of man i was addicted to speed for 10 years before some good people at the airport got together and staged an intervention 10 years try 30 except for me speed was just the beginning i developed a terrible case of the crabs i just couldn't touch down in a crosswind without side loading the gear and tell the group how you finally beat it gary one day at a time i went to the landing clinic here in town and the instructors gave me some initial treatment but after that it was just sheer willpower and the support and tips of all you guys i've been clean five years now i'll never touch down the crab clearly the group therapy and support concept can be applied to a wide range of conditions but will it ultimately help scott with his landing problems only time will tell all right don't make me bring the intervention clinic to lakeland florida next year go out there and practice those takeoffs and those landings thank you very much for coming good job jg thank you so much thank you so much well you know folks uh jg is going to be the next speaker we have here so uh you know talking about gps i believe right yes sir so stay tuned come back take a break make it happen