Listening to the radio transmissions of a VFR pilot who had a panic
attack in a cloud of IMC, I heard him mention to a controller that
"the stall horn goes off every time I land." I thought that was
bizarre. Is a touchdown supposed to be a stall? My stall horn
doesn't sound on landing.

When I first started landing in the sim (after it had advanced enough
to allow realistic landings), I sometimes stalled the aircraft (but
without an alarm). Later I came to the conclusion that this might not
be good. If the aircraft stalls, you lose control of it right above
the runway. You can't pitch down to pick up speed and restore lift,
and the engines cannot speed up quickly enough to pull you out of the
stall, either. Unless you are inches above the runway, you come
banging down onto it, and in my case I've collapsed the gear many
times this way. So I figured that stalling on landing might not be
the way to do.

These days I try to stay above stall speed throughout the landing,
even during the flare. The flare arrests my descent, but does not
stall the aircraft. I reduce throttle at the same time as the flare
so that I naturally tend to begin a gentle descent, and this seems to
set me down very nicely on the runway, although it takes longer this
way (but small aircraft usually don't need the whole runway, anyway).
And if anything goes wrong, I can power up and pull away without
delay, since I haven't stalled.

So, which is the preferred way to land, and why?

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