Landings

One thing I've noticed is that the quality of my landings tend to have in inverse relationship to the number of people who are watching or could be watching. I don't even have to know they are there. If a bunch of ramp-rats are looking on, I will land the airplane with all the finesse of smacking a F-4 onto an aircraft carrier in heavy seas, one of the "did we land or were we shot down" types, where hopefully no large parts fell off the airplane. But if nobody is within eyeshot, it's more likely to be a "skygod" landing.

Several years ago, I was practicing night landings at a certain airport that Scully and I both know. Landing at night has its own challenges, since the only portion of the pavement you can see is the portion lit by the aircraft landing light. I've found it better to not even use the landing light and then I focus on the optical picture of the overall runway as presented by the runway's lights. The technique is to level off and stop the descent just above the runway, hold a nose-high attitude and keep that as the airplane settles onto the runway (this is called "flaring"). If everything is good, you flare a foot or so above the runway and land gently. If everything is not so good, you flare several feet above the runway and do a slam-test of the landing gear.

That night, everything came together and I must have flared an imperceptible height above the runway, for as I held the control wheel back, the airplane slowed. And slowed. And slowed. And then I turned off the runway onto the taxiway, with no idea when the airplane made contact with the runway. "Smooth as glass" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Of course, nobody saw it.