Landing airplanes

Dan Luke wrote:
I think what I'm doing is feeling for ground effect.

Of course you are. But you can't tell someone to feel for ground
effect. I mean you can, but if he's not already doing it, telling him
to do it won't get him any closer. And that's really the issue. When
you have to teach someone to land a new flavor of airplane and you're
not dealing with someone who can feel these things well, you have to
start out procedurally to some extent, to get him close to the right
way. Otherwise you either have to help him on the controls (which
damages confidence and slows the learning process), or there's an awful
lot of wear and tear on the airplane. The people I check out generally
maintain their own airplanes, and don't appreciate the excess wear and
tear.

How much? As much as you had on touchdown? More? Does it matter?
More; it's what I was taught.

There are airplanes where that won't work so well. The most common
example are the Pipers with stabilators (all-flying tails). Too much
back pressure and you stall, banging down the nosewheel. Not awful,
but suboptimal. On the other hand, there are airplanes where you
better apply all the back pressure there is for the rollout (and some
of them are also Pipers).

It certainly seems intuitive in my case. I don't know what I'm doing; I
just do it.

And that's fine until you have to teach someone else to do it.

One of the more challenging things to do in aviation is to check
yourself out in a new aircraft that has handling characteristics
significantly different from any you've flown before. It's certainly
possible to do this - test pilots do it for a living - but it's not
trivial. That's why when I have to check myself out in something new,
I try to talk to as many people who have flown it as possible.
Sometimes that works out well, and sometimes I get bad information.
Usually the bad information comes from some like you - he can fly it,
but he can't really verbalize what he does to make it happen. Got
pretty scary once.

Michael