No matter how smooth and enjoyable the flight, your passengers always will remember the landing. Anything other than a single, bounce-free touchdown is ripe for comment and, if your passengers also are pilots, ridicule. While a good landing is a combination of many factors, the last chance you have to affect its outcome is in the flare. Whether you’re flaring too high above the runway or too low, at too high an airspeed or too enthusiastically, there’s usually a fix for what ails your landings. A lot of it can come down to how you transition from approaching the runway with the nose down to the ideal nose-up, power-off attitude, inches above the runway. It’s not that hard.
Effective landing flares hinge on precise airspeed management (ideally 1.2-1.3 VSO) to prevent floating or premature stalls, combined with a smooth, continuous increase in back pressure on the pitch control.
The ultimate aim of the flare is to gently "stall" the aircraft just above the runway, ensuring the main landing gear touches down first, particularly for tricycle-gear airplanes, while maintaining pitch for proper attitude.
Flare techniques require adaptation for challenging conditions: add speed and power for gusts, use power to manage crosswind touchdowns, and adopt a slower approach with a more enthusiastic flare for short fields.
No matter how smooth and enjoyable the flight, your passengers always will remember the landing. Anything other than a single, bounce-free touchdown is ripe for comment and, if your passengers also are pilots, ridicule. While a good landing is a combination of many factors, the last chance you have to affect its outcome is in the flare.
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