Someone told me once that landing is the only maneuver that we fly that is absolutely mandatory. If you think about it, this makes complete sense. We don’t have to take off, but once we do, the only thing that we must do is land! So, once you have mastered takeoff, it’s a good idea to make sure you are 100% competent in landing. My instructor taught me how to land before teaching me how to take off.
The tricky part about landing is the fact that you will be flying so close to stall. Unlike full-scale pilots, we do not have an airspeed indicator and the physical connection to the plane that allows us to feel the stall. However, to me, landing a model aircraft is still very much a “by feel” thing. We just feel the stall in a different sense. The way we feel it is in our thumb that is on the stick that controls the elevator.
As our model flies slower, the wing will need a higher angle of attack to maintain altitude. Therefore, while you are setting up for landing, if you suddenly have a need to add more and more elevator to maintain your altitude, it is time to add throttle to avoid the impending stall.
Let’s talk about a concept that is hard to grasp. When flying a model airplane, and you are low and slow on final approach, the concept is this: elevator controls speed, while throttle controls rate of descent/ascent. Most people believe the opposite to be true. However this concept is painfully obvious when you are flying close to the ground and you "run out of up-elevator" and your plane quickly falls to the ground. What happened is as you added more and more elevator, you also decreased the speed until the plane stalled a dropped to the ground. The mistake is using the elevator alone to try to maintain descent to landing. Instead you want to use throttle to slow your descent and elevator to slow the plane down, as it gets closer to touchdown. It is hard to perform a landing this way after you have been trained to do the opposite.
In reality, most pilots who "grease" their landings use a combination of elevator and throttle all the way to touchdown. It takes coordination of the elevator and the throttle to perform perfect landings. |