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FLOATING DOWN THE RUNWAY? HERE’S HOW TO FIX IT.

It’s frustrating to watch stripe after stripe pass underneath your nose, well past where you planned to touch down. Worse yet, your airspeed just isn’t bleeding off. We’ve all been there.

Whether it’s your first solo flight, or you’re a seasoned airline captain, floating down the runway past your touchdown point is a problem that all pilots face. This is what you need to know about why you’re floating and what you can do to fix it.

START WITH A FLYING A GOOD PATTERN

All good landings start in the pattern. Try to fly traffic patterns with recommended airspeeds from your airplane’s POH. While the FAA offers no guidance for recommended speeds on downwind, according to the Airplane Flying Handbook, when you turn on to your base leg, you should transition to a speed of 1.4 x Vso (again, only if your manufacturer doesn’t recommend a speed).

WHAT IS CRUISE CLIMB SPEED, AND WHEN SHOULD YOU USE IT?

If Vx is your best angle of climb (used to reach an altitude in the shortest lateral distance) and Vy is your best rate of climb (used to reach an altitude in the shortest amount of time), then what exactly is Vcc, or cruise climb speed?

Vcc is commonly called “enroute climb speed”, and it’s always faster than Vy. Unless a steep climb is required to avoid terrain or to fly a departure procedure, cruise climb speeds allow you to fly faster, with a relatively small loss of climb performance.

So what aircraft have a cruise climb speed, and what types of aircraft benefit most from it? We’ll get to that in a bit, but first…

BENEFITS OF FLYING VCC

Cruise climb helps you in three ways. First, increased airflow keeps your engine cooler in the climb. That’s especially important for high performance piston aircraft.

WHAT CAUSES ENGINE FIRES DURING START?

Did you know that engine fires during start are fairly common, especially in the winter months? You might be thinking “OK great, so this could happen to me?!” Yes, it can. And it can happen a lot easier than you might think.

Over-priming is the leading cause for engine fires on the ground. If your engine doesn’t start, how many times are you going to re-prime? How many times does it take to over prime?

During a cold engine start, you have to prime the engine. When you prime an engine, you’re putting fuel into the cylinders (or the intake manifold) so that the engine can fire. Pilots tend to over-prime the engine by priming too much or too many times (we’re guilty of it too). In contrast, there are very few people who prime too little.

So what happens when you over-prime? When you prime the engine, the extra fuel goes to one of three places:

GROUND EFFECT: WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET CLOSE TO THE GROUND

Love it or hate it, ground effect plays a big part in your landings (and takeoffs). And if your approach to landing is too fast, ground effect can really get the best of you, as you float, and float, and float down the runway.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?!

We’ve all been there. You start your round out for landing, you’re too fast, and you wait for your wheels to touch down. You wait a little longer, and a little longer, and pretty soon, you’re half way down the runway.

That floating happens because of ground effect. But what it really comes down to are wingtip vortices, and what happens to them as your wings get close to the ground.

HOW THE GROUND LIMITS WINGTIP VORTICES

Ground effect basically comes down to how big your wingtip vortices are, and how much downwash they’re creating.

5 WAYS YOUR NIGHT LANDING CAN GO BAD

Landing is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things to do in aviation. Landing at night is even harder. And since it’s the middle of winter there’s a lot of night time, chances are you’re making more night landings.

With significantly fewer visual cues, you need to rely on your instruments and airport lighting much more during night landings. There are lots of different reasons your night landing can go badly (more than we can possibly list here), but these are 5 of the most common problem areas.

1) BLACK HOLE EFFECT

When you’re flying into an airport that has very few ground features and lights around it, you get the illusion that you’re higher than you actually are. That’s because the airport looks like an island of bright lights, with nothing but darkness around it.