subject: Cessna 172 - The Landing Pattern That Will Lead to a Good Touchdown [print this page] Cessna 172 - The Landing Pattern That Will Lead to a Good Touchdown
Like it or not, pilots get judged on landings more than any other aspect of flight. You can spend two hours 100 feet off altitude, another hour not quite sure where you are, but if you bring it in with a squeaker, you'll be congratulated. There's a certain about of justice in that, landings are the phase of flight requiring the most skill and best reactions. On the other hand, no one rolls it on every time. That last minute gust or misjudged 12 inches can easily make a great landing good or a good one slightly embarrassing. You can't win them all, but you can put yourself in a position of house odds.
Fortunately, considering the whole general aviation fleet, the Cessna 172 is not a difficult airplane to land. In fact, the imaginative Cessna marketing department dubbed the 1956 172 the Land-O-Matic. Though that probably didn't contribute to the confidence of those unable to make the Land-O-Matic feature work properly, it does hint that the 172 is not the most difficult beast to wrestle onto a runway.
So, what are the steps required to get those kudos from your passengers for a well executed 172 landing? As any number of books, articles, and airport pundits will tell you, it all starts with a good pattern. What does that mean exactly? A Sunday afternoon at your local strip will expose you to all sorts of patterns. Some so wide on downwind you can't even see the guy, others so high and tight final looks like a dive bombing run on the numbers. Which is right? My own preference is for a fairly tight pattern out of consideration for everyone else, minimizing the time in the pattern, and the safety of being able to make the runway from any point past abeam. But good landings can result from all types of patterns.
More than any particular pattern, what really matters is consistency. If your pattern is always slightly skewed one way or another, and you know what corrections to make for that condition, you're going to have a pattern that can lead to a good landing. This is not an argument for anyone to go out and fly a screwed up pattern just because it works for you. Being where others expect you to be is very important. It is though an acknowledgement that we were all trained by different people, with different philosophies, in various aircraft, under varied conditions. In other words, there's no definitive right answer, and even if there were, some people would be unable to execute on it.
What is the trick to developing the consistency you're looking for? Practice is the main thing. It's how the Navy does it. Every flight of a tactical jet ends in a landing simulating a carrier landing, and most are graded and debriefed. If you want to get better with your landings you have to practice and evaluate them- even if you're the only one in the plane.
Just any old practice won't do, you have to go at it systemically. In the early stages of training, or if you need to work on getting back to fundamentals, the trick is to orient your pattern to objects on the ground. Fly over the same building on downwind, turn to base at the corner of a particular field and do the same on final, and you'll have consistent parameters to work from. The key is to limit the variables. If you can then hold your altitude correctly and do something predictable with your power settings, you're most of the way to a good landing.
What happens though when you go to an unfamiliar airport? You won't have any landmarks and you probably won't want to go around several times to find them. What you're working towards is developing a sight picture from the air, irrespective of landmarks. Once you learn to correlate where you should be by flying over a landmark with the way the runway looks, you can transfer your attention to the runway environment. You'll also work at adjusting that picture to the nature of the runway environment. Small runways or ones with up slopes make you seem higher than you are, while large open ones make you feel lower. With practice you should be able to acknowledge those factors and make adjustments to what you're seeing.
What are the power settings? In a 172 if you go to 1500 RPM abeam with a notch of flaps, slow to 80 kts, descend 100 feet, turn to base with the numbers 45 degrees behind the wing, put in another notch of flaps after you complete the turn to base, roll to final 400 feet agl, and put in the rest of the flaps, you're going to be somewhere close to where you should be if there isn't much wind.
