Landings question

Your description of the way to give a student a look
at the picture they shoul see and therefore the attitude
they should have is spot on. In addition I used to
point out that the point to which they raise their
eyes from looking at the reference point before they
make the attitude change must be as far as their percieved
horizon. If they choose a point too close I would point
out that when they pitch the nose up if the point is
too close they will not be able to see it and therefore
there is a tendency not to pitch up far enough in order
keep their chosen point in view.

At 13:12 09 September 2006, Papa3 wrote:

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.