landing configuration

In my ( sadly long gone ) days of student flight tuition my instructor used to call them 'tactical approaches' : steep slope ingress, flaps right down, fast rate of descent, washing energy off left/right/centre, with a well timed flare. Airframe/wing drag consumes the gravitational potential energy being spent, so ideally there is little/no speed increase on the way down. Key point : trim carefully before entering the manoeuvre ie. you won't have the time during. Fun but not for the faint-hearted. If you yearn for even more excitement then try all of that with crossed controls - rudder kicked to yaw one way with ailerons to roll the other - as one might need to do in crosswinds etc. Or even better : simply go & learn in the New Guinea highlands. If you are alive after the first week then you pass ! :-)

I know an A380 chief pilot whose primary role is to take-off and land for the really long hauls eg. non-stop Melbourne to Los Angeles. Apart from that he clips the younger crew over the ear-hole if they need it. The trick, as it were, to landing well is very precise knowledge of the characteristics of the plane per configuration. Then one has a good approach setup, with the rest drawing on years of gentle but firm hands on the yoke.

Cheers, Mike.

Indeed ! ;-)

Real pilots anticipate in ways autopilots can't. Plus of course they fear death in a way that autopilots don't.

My 'per configuration' comment is to emphasize that modern planes can often change their 'type' dramatically, in ways not done earlier. Interestingly Mr Fowler invented his flap design - sliding extra wing segments down/out of slots to create curvature - in the mid 1920s ! Long before implementation. I'd bet he used to watch the birds too.

The best tactical approach flare ( aka well timed ) is to have some ground effect in play. You trap a volume of air b/w wing and ground. That air has an inertia such that it can't move quickly away from beneath ( over the time scale of the manouevre ). So the vertical velocity component is nulled in the manner of a cushion. It feels a tad weird through the controls if you do. I never managed to do that but my instructor could really get it right. 

Cheers, Mike.