I have a little over 50 hours tt in a C-170B. How I was thought to do X-wind landing with gusting and high winds was to use 20 deg flaps and side slip using about the same speed as a normal landing. If I ran out of rudder I could land in to the wind cross runway into taxiway using full flap and cancel out the x-wind for the most part. Even when flying in 45-60 deg X-winds at 20-25g30 I never felt that I was out of rudder yet.

We are out of rudder when we have the rudder pedal on the stop and the airplane is turning, uncontrolled, into the wind. Or drifting downwind if we won't put the wing down to stop it. God is talking to us. He wants us to land in a different direction. It can happen at any time during the landing. If there are hills or obstructions upwind of the runway, they act like the venturi of our carb. The crosswind increases between the hills or obstructions. If we land fast and long, we give these venturi opportunity to cause an uncontrolled turn into the wind when we have no opportunity to change our directed course more into the wind. Landing on the taxiway more into the wind is also a good solution. Hover taxiing down the runway in a crab until we reach the taxiway and then using a cross controlled rudder turn to align with the taxiway would be a little tricky. I have never tried that but that doesn't mean I should dismiss it. Slow ground speed is good in any ground reference maneuver. Ground speed is the issue in landing.

Ground speed is also the issue when turning base to final. Make it slow. Turn into the wind. If God offers us a gift, why would we reject it?

God gave us gravity too, get slow when the wind stops and you'll meet him. Landings have never been as terrifying as the moment after, when the wind gets under a wing and tries to flip you over.

So contactflying - you're an advocate for very slow touchdowns, does that in your opinion predispose you to avoid wheel landings on very winds days? I'll qualify that -
Some of the most experienced tailwheel pilots I know prefer wheel landings in a tailwheel above landing a trike on very windy days, because you can plant it on the ground with enough airspeed for more control, then slow down on the ground with some steering - if you run out of control at very slow speeds, "oh well" it shouldn't do damage. With a nosewheel, at some point you have to get that nose up to slow down, so the mains can land first in a backcountry situation, which means slowing down closer to the stall and risking getting blown sideways by the wind - making precision landing harder.

Battson wrote:How do you handle this "throttle-jockying" when flying larger, higher powered engines? Just do it and wear the consequences...? Or do you take a more energy-conservation centric approach and fly faster - or maybe cruise in 5kts faster and slow in the last 100ft? What is your method for engine management in that situation?

Hi Battson,

I know these questions were not addressed to me, but didn't see where they got answered, so thought I'd see if my $.02 helps any...

Throttle jockying... I may be out of line here, because you didn't qualify 'larger, higher powered' engines but I'll go out on a limb and assume when you said that you were referring to the more common big sixes... To be honest, I am not all that well versed here. My experience is really limited to the O/IO-470's, -520's, and -540's. I do have a bit of experience in round engines (R-985,1340, and 1820) but those are really on the small end of round engines, and outside of 135 ops really don't see much backcountry stuff...same is true of the kerosene burners I fly. Interestingly enough though, my throttle habits don't tend to change a lot between these types... My rule of thumb; keep it good enough for the most temperamental and it will be good enough for the rest.

So... my take on throttle manipulating... I tend to look at the throttle as another flight control, consequently I like to use it's entire range. If settings were more important than a full range, we would have had a throttle switch...Power settings have their place (cruise comes to mind), but if your idea of 'backcountry' includes precision landings, then I submit that a precision landing (outside of sterile conditions) is simply impossible without the use of throttle.

Wait, wait.... before all the glider pilots or armchair flyers get up in arms I feel it's important we qualify the use of 'precision' here... If hitting the numbers at the airport is your idea of precision, you can stop reading and leave the gas alone. If your idea of precision is planting your left main on the leading edge of the paint, then we're speaking the same language... and here you need the gas pedal to counter gusts, shear, thermals, shadows, and on and on... Oh and BTW, all you glider pilots that puffed your chests out and said 'we land precision without even having a gas pedal' ... I guess we can keep the spoilers (a gas pedal in reverse) as our little secret...

On to the point of the engine's feelings about this... There was a thread about go-arounds, something about how scary it was to pour the coals to a big engined airplane... quit shoving the throttle and start handling it
I think of engines like women.... I have never met a fine women that did not like to be handled , handle your engine that way, and it too won't care how much fuel you feed it or how often.

Light the coals, pull up to the line and let her rip with cold oil and cht... well she's gonna get pissy...

Run her like a pissed off lumber jack down final, and not only will she get pissy, but all bets on precision are off.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean you don't use the throttle, use as little or as much as you need, but need is the key... because when we are landing, what we are really doing is almost flying. Too low? nudge the power a bit, and you really oughta be flying again. Too high? take a little more flying (read; throttle) out of the equation...

Throttle jockey? Me? you betcha...

Battson-I almost always use wheel landings, windy or not. I just slow down before leveling to touch down. Using power/pitch to be at or near stall speed when we get there doesn't require the round out, flair, and hold off of fast landings. The 1.3 idea came about when they decided to integrate instrument with contact flying. Contact flying, which is concerned with ground speed, lost out to the instrument approach for all approaches. In a big wind, the airplane will be more level than in a no wind. We have to be careful not to bang a nose wheel. Ground speed will be slow while airspeed is high. The only time the tail wheel will touch down first is when we are landing downwind. We have to hold the nose so high with power to get slow enough, behind the power curve, that the tail wheel may touch down first. We may be below stall speed with high power and ground effect. If the tail is down, we hold it down. Someone said they knew a crop duster that always three pointed. He must have been a CFI and felt he had to do the school solution when in a training airplane.

Yes Rob, I was talking about A-65,75,85, and 90, 0-320, 0-360, 0-540, -300, 0-470, 0-200, R-985 and R-1340, etc. Little engines and round engines don't mind dynamic throttle control. Continental engines are prone to shock cooling, but we don't get high enough to have the throttle closed very long.

Before I get nailed, appropriately, for downwind landings and takeoffs, there are a couple of places I can think of that they are useful. One is the one way airport or landing zone. The other is spreader work. It is harder to overload a crop duster with seed and many dry materials. A common practice, when the wind gets up, is to quit spraying and start seeding or fertilizing. At many common 3,000' runways in crop country, the auger trucks will be parked halfway down the runway and planes will land to the load from both ways on the 1500' available. One will be landing downwind and one will be taking off downwind each time. The hopper on each plane will empty in less than 15 minutes. There will be hundreds of takeoffs and landings and nobody ever, ever lands long. Three pointers, unless the tail is already down, and round out, flair, and hold off techniques are not appropriate here.

Tail gears on big, round or jet engine, crop dusters put the airplane in an almost level pitch attitude on the ground. There is nothing wrong with nose or long tail gears. Level is the most efficient attitude for any airplane with any gear arrangement.

Contact-dude knows what he's talking about. In the last year or so since I read his book (not an easy read) I've come to a level of, what shall I say, understanding with my 180 that I never had in the first 12 years of ownership. Dave Sherwood

Thanks for sharing your views on those two questions, Rob and Contactflying.

mbdave wrote:Contact-dude knows what he's talking about. In the last year or so since I read his book (not an easy read) I've come to a level of, what shall I say, understanding with my 180 that I never had in the first 12 years of ownership. Dave Sherwood

What is the title of the book?

The book is titled "Contact Flying", and as Dave said it is a hard read. But it is full of gold and well worth the effort. You can find it at Amazon.

Barnstormer wrote:The book is titled "Contact Flying", and as Dave said it is a hard read. But it is full of gold and well worth the effort. You can find it at Amazon.

Thanks!

We're not supposed to advertise here, but I can send you a signed one cheaper than Amazon. If you have modern handheld electronic devices with aps, whatever that is, it should be really cheap. They pay me almost nothing. Or just wait. I'm so full of bullshit, I'll eventually post it all here for free.

contactflying wrote:Or just wait. I'm so full of bullshit, I'll eventually post it all here for free.

Ha ha! That's almost exactly what I was thinking; half of the book is probably on this site!

contactflying wrote:We're not supposed to advertise here, but I can send you a signed one cheaper than Amazon.

For the record, from Welcome to Backcountry Pilot: A Newbie's Guide:

Go ahead and post about your product or service, but make an effort to stay involved and answer questions that members may have. Be real and be modest. The secret to success in selling to our community is to simply put your link in your signature, and then genuinely interact with us. Be one of us. Continued disingenuous plugging of your wares will only garner contempt.

If you satisfy the requirements of being a personally engaged member of the community, you may engage in limited promotion of your business or services. If you're posting to promote your business, you get 1 dedicated thread. Additional promotional threads added will be deleted, but you may continue to update your 1 promotional thread.

This is my policy on self-promotion. Nowhere do I prohibit advertising. Put a link in your signature to your book on Amazon, and interact like a normal community member. People will notice if they think you're knowledgeable and find their way to your wares.

I am old. A computer, for me, is a really nice typewriter. Google, for me, is a really nice encyclopedia. I really don't know what a link is.

I liked Rob's discussion of throttle. It is a flight control. Use it. All the talk about shock, particularly cooling leads me to ask: What about shock heating? We don't worry when we go full throttle on takeoff.
So, dance with the controls... all of them. If you can't cancel the drift... go around and do it from a different angle. If that doesn't work, go somewhere it does work. From the instructor seat I see "freezing on the controls" sometimes. A pilot gets very close to touching down and just holds the controls wherever they are at that moment. And even then on the rollout. Or relaxes the back pressure and dumps the nosewheel hard. I call that the "thank God I just landed" syndrome. We have all heard that it isn't done flying until tied down. Well, those sayings are there because.... WOW... it's true.
Having read all of the thread though... I am reminded that cross wind landings are FUN.
They are skill builders and a real hoot on a gusty day. You go home feeling like you accomplished something other than burning expensive gas.

Contact, if you look at the top of any page that has an address (like for instance, this page says posting.php?mode=reply&f=6&t=12466), and you copy that address, then paste it into the forum message that you're writing, that becomes a link. To copy it, you don't need to type it all by hand; all you need to do is highlight it (clicking with your left mouse button will usually do that; sometimes you need to double click), then click on it with your right mouse button so that a menu comes up, then left click on "copy". Then in your message, when you get to where you want to insert it, right click again, and then left click on "paste". That's all there is to inserting a link. Then to read what that link is, the reader only needs to left click on the link, and whatever that link is "linked" to will appear, sometimes on a different tab, sometimes on the same tab, depending on how the forum was set up.

For us TOFs, sometimes these darned computer thingies can sure be annoying!

Cary