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November 2007
The Beauty
is in the Landing
Airplane
watchers. You can see them almost
any Sunday afternoon, outside the airport
security fence at the end of the active
runway. They bring lawn chairs,
blankets, lunches, beverages, loud music,
and their friends, and they congregate
under the flight path of landing
aircraft. Many airports accommodate
these people by constructing a
quasi-park, or at least an open
field. Vancouver
International (YVR) has a great
approach park on the east end of
08-26. The fence is very close to
the runway too. Even better.
Yes, I’ve spent
some time at various “approach
parks”. Seems even those who
fly the planes like to watch
‘em. Landings are always the
best. I’ve often sat in front of the
hangar and spent the afternoon watching
the student pilots in the circuit,
practicing the endless
touch-‘n-goes. I’m always
fascinated.
The landing seems to
be the part that determines the success
or failure of a flight. Determines
whether it was a good day or a bad
day. Most pilots never comment on
their ability to hold an altitude or
heading, or navigate at low levels in the
mountains. But they’ll tell
you about the smooth touchdown when they
got to where they were
going. Everything else is
foreplay. The landing is the real
thing, the big event.
Landing an airplane
is more a work of art than a
science. And if that’s a true
statement, then taildraggers and
floatplanes are Academy Award
nominees. In my logbook there are a
few hundred hours in tailwheel aircraft,
some on pavement, mostly on gravel and
grass. There is also one ground
loop noted, a harmless, low-speed affair
when I let one get away from me in
severe, gusting crosswinds. And it
wasn’t early in my
career. Experience means nothing to
the airplane. The taildragger is
like a cannibal, just waiting for a
chance to bite you.
The prettiest
landings in my opinion, are on
floats. There’s a really active
seaplane base in the Nanaimo, B.C.
harbour where you can sit at a waterfront
cafe and watch planes come and go all
day. Several companies, Harbour Air
and West-Coast Air among them, routinely
land and depart numerous times every
hour. I never tire of the
show. These pilots nurse
their planes down, holding just inches
above the water until at just the right
moment the floats ‘kiss’ the
surface, they bring the power slowly
back, and the plane skims, settles, and
finally digs in as the nose comes
up.
PHOTO COURTESY GARY
ALGATE
I don’t have
much float time, but would be doing it
again if the opportunity ever came
up. The instant the floats touch
the water is always satisfying. The
feeling is like a gentle ‘tug’
on the airplane, rather than the
‘bump’ when wheels touch
pavement. The sea plane pilots tend to
land on wheels using the same techniques
as on floats. They hold a slightly
nose-high attitude, and control the
descent with power. With a lot of
practice, they become true artists,
painting the prettiest picture a plane
watcher could ever see.
On a flight into a
grass strip in the mountains one day, I
used that approach. And it was
really nice! As the wheels skimmed
then delicately settled in the turf, the
sensation was like landing on water. Not
even a bump, until about half way through
the run-out and at nothing more than a
high taxi speed, one wheel dropped into a
depression around a gopher hole. The
effect on the plane was more of a
deceleration than a jolt such as
you’d feel on a hard
landing. Because ELT’s are
designed to trigger on horizontal impact,
the gopher hole was just enough to set
mine off. After congratulating
myself on such a smooth landing, I
couldn’t believe the ELT signal
blaring in the headset was from my
aircraft!
Flying an airplane never killed anybody.
It’s the landing that does it. Some say any landing you
walk away from is a good one. No one who thinks about
that statement would ever say it with conviction. I’ve
walked away from many, many landings that were bad ones.
They can’t all be good, but I never stop trying for
perfection.
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