The advantageous of the apparent brisk walk rate of closure approach are many; both to the instructor and student and to those who want or need to land short.

If we prevent the speed up of the apparent brisk walk rate of closure on short final by increasingly pitch attitude to decrease ground speed and power to control the resultant sink, we will be slow enough to flair at the numbers. This eliminates the need for the round out and hold off of the stabilized airspeed approach.

The advantage to the instructor is that it makes the six to ten hours solo very doable. The advantage to the student is the increased confidence of early solo. The advantage to backcountry pilots is an easy and reliable power pitch approach that results in control of the airplane all the way down to a slow and soft touchdown on the desired touchdown point.

Yes, we all have to be able to land without power for testing and forced landing. The apparent brisk walk rate of closure approach still works to get us into the beginning of the landing zone, but we have to save some extra potential gravity thrust for the sink control for which we normally have power. Unlike glider pilots, we have no spoiler to manage glide angle.

In this power off approach, we will flair when the airplane begins to descend out of ground effect. We do not control this timing. Dynamic proactive elevator movement is helpful to manage hold off altitude and prevent ballooning or bouncing after touchdown with flying speed.

I always try to flare with flair.

You're a poet and don't know it.

Zzz wrote:

Hahaha!
I haven’t had tv for 35 years, and even I know that scene. It’s such a perfect example of idiocy at the helm of authority...America in a nutshell.

You can get some good re-runs about Rick Flair, it's all on demand now so any time is good.

Zzz wrote:

Ha!

That was a great show and hilarious that I thought of the same scene when I saw the Thread Title.

My first airplane was named flair. It's in Homer now....

Oops! I left my homonyms checker on my Ghost Writer program disk back at Tohatchi. It helped my Freshmen English and myself a lot. Too bad when we had to turn in the Apple 2es for IBMs with hard drives. No more Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium free educational program disks. You know; the ones where you had to do the lesson because there was no net, no games.

I have a tin ear. After we were married about a year, my wife leaned over to my ear, while we were singing in church, and said, "just move your lips."

The only way I know of to control airspeed in a way that will actually put the pilot in control of flare timing is to slow airspeed, on short final, so that very soon after entering ground effect we are at velocity of stall in ground effect. The only technique I know of that will safely allow that airspeed reduction is the apparent brisk walk rate of closure approach.

Granted, in a strong headwind component, we will be touching down above stall speed. We just may not roll very far after touchdown.

I've been flying my approaches for years now at an apparent brisk rate of walk closure airspeed.
AND incorporating dynamic and proactive use of the rudder.
AND using extra potential gravity thrust to moderate the sink rate.
AND probably used that potential zoom of something-or-other airspeed too.
Just never knew those techniques had those fancy sounding names.
We just called it "doing that pilot shit".

contactflying wrote:The only way I know of to control airspeed in a way that will actually put the pilot in control of flare timing is to slow airspeed, on short final, so that very soon after entering ground effect we are at velocity of stall in ground effect. The only technique I know of that will safely allow that airspeed reduction is the apparent brisk walk rate of closure approach.

To be fair, you can just hold 1.3*Vso like they say and glide it over the surface for a mile before you sink in. You're still in control of the timing, you just have to want the timing to happen a long way past the numbers.

hotrod180 wrote:We just called it "doing that pilot shit".

Hotrod180,

And it works! Next step, for a teacher, is to put that pilot stuff into terms, both simple and fancy, old and new, standard and non-standard, calm and exaggerated, whatever works. The whole point, for quick and confident learning, is to allow the student to learn mostly by doing. I have never seen the value of having the student watch me fly for more than the very little time it takes to demonstrate once. They learn best by doing and we teach best by talking. Oh! And spelling correctly when we write.

I could use the standardized words, but have found them insufficient to cover non-standard technique.

Colopilot,

I think you are in agreement that the stabilized approach results in less control or at least less control of when the airplane will get down slowly and softly.

contactflying wrote:I could use the standardized words, but have found them insufficient to cover non-standard technique.

This is the hard part for what Jim is doing.

Words have meanings, but depending on where you’re from and how you learned a thing, those meanings may not be the same across the board.

You nailed it Cam. That is why the Army uses orientation/indoctrination to get everybody on the same page to start with. But I except you, as l, have run into outlandish ones who can be expected to be where they need to be when they need to be there. No; they seldom get rated "Advance ahead of peers."

Instructing, I have found it useful to keep talking until the student says, "shut up so I can think!"

Strangely, at Ag Flight Flight I learned that it was effective to teach my unusual techniques before solo in six to ten hours. The civilian standardized stuff can be covered in the remaining hours to pass the Private test at forty hours.

In the process, I discovered my techniques to be the easier of the two for zero time students to learn. Standardized first seems to be more time consuming and difficult. At Ft Wolters I was extremely lucky to have one of the outlandish ones for primary instructor.