Cats wrote:
I am one of those people with ongoing intermittent landing problems. I
have good patches - managed to get solo recently - and then bad
patches. The bad patches probably co-incide with forgetting to look up
as I start the round-out, so there is no hold-off and a rather heavy
landing, sometimes with a bounce.



I have students sit in the glider while two other folks stand outside:
one levels the wings, the other one stands at the tail. We then lift
the tail to the pitch attitude that approximates approach speed to get
a good feel for that sight picture. I ask the student to carefully
pick some reference points and try to ingrain those in his/her mind.
We then rotate to landing attitude and to the same. I really want the
person to get the idea that they rotat to a certain attitude and then
hold there while speed bleeds off. Obviously, this isn't perfect,
since the rotation really needs to happen a little bit higher up
(grin), but it does give the sense for the amount of pitch change
required.

Depending on the aircraft, the rotation can be pretty significant (e.g.
a 2-33) or pretty subtle (e.g. a G103).

I definitely agree that getting yourself to focus on a point in the
distance (e.g. tree tops at the far end of the runway) makes this whole
process easier. Whatever you do, spend some time on the ground in the
airplane fooling around with this.

Erik Mann
LS8-18 P3

p.s. A good friend of mine did the same thing for me when I was trying
to learn to fly taildraggers in a J3 Cub. It was really helpful to
get a sense for the min and max pitch attitudes required.