flaps

IMHO, full flaps are called for on a normal landing...it is only when gusts
or crosswinds raise their ugly heads that lesse deflections should be used.
The goal is minimum speed at touchdown, and you are depriving yourself of a
huge energy sink.

Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

Bob Gardner

"Kobra" wrote in message
. ..
Aviators,

My wife and I flew to Williamsburg (JGG) in our 177RG on Sat. and stayed
until Sunday.

On base at Williamsburg I noticed that the airspeed was really high. I
raised the nose and pulled some power. I had 20 degrees of flaps in and
that is what I usually land with. On final the airspeed was just coming
out of the green and touching the white arc with only 15 inches manifold
pressure. On short final I dropped the last 10 degrees, but despite that,
man I came across the threshold like a bat-out-of-hell.

The runway was only 3000 feet, but somehow I got it down and stopped after
heavy brake burning. I just figured I used some really bad technique or
picked up a tailwind.

I looked at the wind sock and it was stone dead and limp.

On my pre-flight for the trip home I found out why all this happened.
Sometime after lift-off to JGG the flaps went TU. I had no flaps on
landing and I never noticed!! I can hardly believe I don't consciencely
or unconsciencely look to see if the flaps are deploying. Why didn't I
notice that the flap indicator didn't move or that the plane didn't change
pitch or that it didn't push me against the shoulder harness as usual. I
just didn't catch the fact that no flaps came out.

Now I had to get home. I called my mechanic and he said it could be many
things (it wasn't the breaker). He also said I was a complete wimp (he
used a different word that began with a p) if I couldn't land that plane
without the flaps on our 3,500 feet of runway.

I took off and started to ponder the situation:

No flaps
No daylight with 3 miles vis. in haze and mist (ASOS said 10 miles but no
way could you see more than 3 miles)
No landing light (it burned out two weeks ago)
No wind (so no headwind to help slow the airplane's ground speed on
landing)
and I've done a grand total of two no-flap landings in my life. One with
my primary CFI and one during my check out when I bought the plane. Both
during the day with a headwind.

Well, obviously everything went fine and I exited on the second taxiway
off 19 at N14, my homebase. I landed as slow as I could, but the nose was
so high that seeing ahead of the airplane was almost impossible.

I used runway 19 because runway 1 has trees on the approach and I wanted
to come in as flat as possible.

Anyway...how many different things can cause this? Where should I start
looking?

I also recommend that everyone do some no flap landings each year.

Kobra

Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.

This post, IMHO, above all else, is a real tribute to the utility of
manual, Johnson-bar flap actuators. Hard to miss when THOSE don't
work.

:-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On Jul 10, 3:38 pm, Jay Honeck wrote:
Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.


Jay,
I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Hai Longworth

I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Oh, we practice all the other stuff -- but short-short-short field
landings are NOT one of them. Botching a power-off, let's-plant-it-on-
the-numbers landing is just too potentially expensive, since Atlas'
nose will slam down like Thor's hammer if you let him get too slow.

Which isn't to say we shy away from short fields. We routinely fly
into 2200 foot grass strips, so we're fairly proficient at it.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:



Which isn't to say we shy away from short fields. We routinely fly
into 2200 foot grass strips, so we're fairly proficient at it.

You should have no problem using a strip half that length with two of
you on board. Is your nosewheel/strut/firewall that delicate? That's
not Pipers reputation, that's Cessna's. Piper's rep is building planes
that are overweight, not fragile.

"
You should have no problem using a strip half that length with two of you
on board. Is your nosewheel/strut/firewall that delicate? That's not
Pipers reputation, that's Cessna's. Piper's rep is building planes that
are overweight, not fragile.


No. The Cherokees have MUCH more fragile landing gear. Not only that but
they are pushed through the wing so that repair is impractical. You'll NEVER
see a Cherokee SIX with 30,000 hours on it, like most Cessna 207s in Alaska.

Karl

Longworth wrote:
I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Hai Longworth


Couldn't have said it better myself.

Jay Honeck wrote:
Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.

I believe my 182 had a similarly sized engine to your Piper and I always
landed as close to full-stall as I could get. If you do it all the
time, then you get to where it works pretty much all the time. And
landing this way SAVES on tires and brakes and, done properly, has no
affect on struts, firewalls, prop or engine.


This post, IMHO, above all else, is a real tribute to the utility of
manual, Johnson-bar flap actuators. Hard to miss when THOSE don't
work.

It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt

It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt,

Yes, you are correct, when the flaps DO deploy it is noticeable. The flaps
on the 177 are large and effective. It's when they DON'T deploy that it can
get past you unnoticed in a busy cockpit. How many times have you flow a
Cessna that the flaps failed to set? Probably never. So most of the
readers here have no idea how they would or wouldn't notice the failure.

If I was a CFI I think I might occasionally pull the flap breaker and see
how many students catch the situation and at what point.

AAMOF I will throw that out there to the CFI's...let's do an experiment.
Pull the breaker when the student isn't looking and have them fly the
pattern for a landing. Post the results on how many did and didn't
understand the problem. If they catch it, at what point did they realize
that no flaps were out? I'd be interested in the results.

Post the results here under this post "flaps".

Kobra

Kobra wrote:
It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt,

Yes, you are correct, when the flaps DO deploy it is noticeable. The flaps
on the 177 are large and effective. It's when they DON'T deploy that it can
get past you unnoticed in a busy cockpit. How many times have you flow a
Cessna that the flaps failed to set? Probably never. So most of the
readers here have no idea how they would or wouldn't notice the failure.

Just once, but I noticed it instantly, and I was already pretty busy
flying an instrument approach into OSH of all places after having lost
my alternator. When I noticed the alternator light come on about 20
miles out, I turned off everything but one navcomm and the transponder.
However, once on short final, the old habit kicked in and I put the
flaps down even though I was on battery power alone at that point. The
flaps made it about 5 degrees before the battery gave up the ghost
completely. I said "crap" and then proceeded to land the airplane. No
big deal and it was instantly obvious that the flaps hadn't deployed
even with my mind a little preoccupied.

Matt