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Last Sunday night, after the houseguests had gone to bed, my wife said, "That was the worst landing you've ever made." My first thought was, "Little do you know! I've made some real mini crashes in my day." The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought, "It was a lousy landing. And, even with 30-plus years of experience, I wish I could do better consistently." And the more I thought about that sad state of affairs, the more I thought that many pilots will privately admit to the same frustration. We can land pretty well most of the time, beautifully occasionally, and then, just when we think we've finally gotten it all together, wham! My kids, trained from infancy to reward me with congratulations for any landing that didn't require orthopedic correction, have a euphemism for a really terrible landing: "Not one of your best, Dad."
Today's arrival was not that hard, but the landing sure was. We were assigned Runway 27, and the wind was 200 at 12, not a big deal. The approach was fine, the speeds were good and the gusts not all that bad. But as I straightened the airplane out and dropped the left wing, I flared a little too much and we started back up. Every pilot knows this uncomfortable feeling; you're going up when you should be going down; you're sailing over some very fine runway that is not endless; your airspeed feels like it's dropping rapidly, but you don't dare take your eyes off the passing real estate long enough to look at the airspeed indicator. I know this feeling well.
I know other bad landing feelings well, too. I had a Musketeer one time, and I could fly it well enough but could never land it. As soon as I touched down, the airplane would start right back towards the heavens, leaving me to conclude that I must dump the flaps at the instant of impact. This unproven aeronautical technique committed my right hand to the flap lever rather than the throttle and was the basis for many interesting landings. The Musketeer was a great airplane. It had all that Beech quality, and it taught me many things, including other ways to make bad landings
I experienced my first (and I hope last) inadvertent downwind landing in that Musketeer. The runway was short and, although I had another pilot with me, he was even less experienced than I was. Neither of us noticed the wind sock direction change, and I was too naïve to note that the approach seemed fast. The problem became dramatically apparent upon touchdown. As we careened back into the air I dumped the flaps; we landed several more times for a few moments each and stared wide-eyed at the approaching trees. They were apple trees. Each landing was announced by a jolt and the screams of the tires, which were not allowed to roll because I had jumped on the brakes in a comic midair attempt to arrest our progress towards a fiery death. So, my wife really has no clue about very bad landings.
