Are you struggling towards first solo? Part 2 of 3. This may be why…

Part 1 of this series discussed some of the issues with conventional landing training. This second part looks at what I did about improving the situation, for students and their instructors.

How it all began

The origins of the Jacobson Flare date back to 1965. When just a 17-year-old young student pilot, training at YMMB (Moorabbin, Victoria, Australia), I started questioning the traditional methods of landing an aircraft, taught by my first flight instructors.

Over 60 years later, I can still recall trying not to be a smart-ass, but being dismayed by having to rely on nothing better than trial-and-error practices. These, I learned, have been passed down, unchallenged since the end of World War I in 1918, by generations of flight instructors.

To this day, I still find it perplexing that pilots are taught what to do to land an aircraft but not how to do it, with any precision or consistency.

The Problems

Initially, I was taught to control airspeed by pitching the airplane with the elevators, while attempting to use power to control the rate of descent. While clearly necessary for a glide approach, it made no sense to me to use the secondary effects of both the elevator and throttle controls to fly the airplane, for a normal powered approach. For me, this generally led to a roller-coaster ride down final approach, with quite inconsistent landing results. Not surprising, with a pitch correction needing a power correction, followed by another pitch correction and so on. There is no stability.

The landing is the most precise manoeuvre that most pilots are ever required to execute. Yet then and later, my serious questions on ‘when to flare‘ were neither answered nor quantified. Most manuals regurgitate the old myths and misinformation.

Getting the ‘hang’ of the landing flare from a combination of guesswork, the ‘look‘, the ‘feel’, repetition, and luck has never made sense to me, whatsoever. I soloed at about 10 hours, but the initial methods that I was taught never sat well with me. They were and they remain non-intuitive and simply unintelligent.

Thankfully, a fine ex-RAF instructor, Jim Noonan, launched my CPL night flying training. In that initial process, he taught me how to aim my eyes at an appropriate aim point by pitching the airplane with the elevators and controlling airspeed with power. What a relief!

I wanted to do this, instinctively, from the start. Later, I learned that this is the technique taught by the airlines, our defence forces, and the more enlightened flying schools.

The Inspiration

My original inspiration for the Jacobson Flare came from an unlikely source, the celebrated 1956 British film ‘The Dam Busters’. The movie depicts the 1943 RAF 617 Squadron’s celebrated application of triangulation: Two precisely aimed converging spotlights and a simple, Y-shaped bomb sight resolved the problems of a low-flying attack over water, at night. As a then 9-year-old, I was enthralled.

One day in 1965, it suddenly clicked: My eye path to the aim point for the B23 Musketeer was a position line, as in navigation. A second position line, such as another one over the nose of the airplane to a point on the runway centreline, short of the aim point, would surely provide a visual fix for the flare point. This had to be better than relying on an educated guess of vertical flare height, which (again, I learned later) is flawed mathematically, to the power of +/- 20 times, along the runway, due to the shallow 3-degree path angle.

The concept of simple triangulation captured my imagination, but, of course, I had minimal flight experience back then. Certainly not enough to dream that my idea might actually work, let alone be universally adaptable to almost any airplane.

Handling the Hurdles

I was also yet to learn that, sadly, some key aviation figures, organisations, even universities are sometimes apathetic. So are airlines and airplane manufacturers. I believe that the approach and landing is the most neglected topic in the flight training syllabus, and the silence on this subject is deafening.

‘We’ve always done it this way’ or “No, thanks” are not arguments or reasons. They are simply lame excuses to avoid rational thinking.

Thankfully, I’ve succeeded in reaching thousands of pilots directly.

My professional career spanned five decades: Starting as a flight instructor in general aviation, I progressed through an exciting and  distinguished career with Trans-Australia Airlines (-TAA, later Australian Airlines -AAL). Flying various aircraft, including the F27, DC-9-30, and B727-100/-200, as a First Officer, I achieved commands later, on the F27, DC-9-30, and B737-300/-400. Following the 1992 merger of AAL with QANTAS Airways, I flew B737-300/-400/-800 aircraft as a Training Captain.

However, it was an earlier incident in 1978 that profoundly influenced my thinking about landing techniques. During a routine flight as a First Officer on a B727-100, a visual illusion at night caused me to misjudge the flare height, resulting in a firm landing. This experience underscored the need for a more precise and reliable method of landing.

Research and Development

By 1983, I was also instructing at the RAAF Point Cook Flying Club, where I rediscovered my passion for elementary flying training. In 1986, after I was appointed by TAA as a DC-9 Training Captain while still instructing concurrently on light aircraft. Then and for many years after, the crippling issues with conventional landing training became clearly apparent. Primarily, they are universal for any airplane type, from sailplanes to A380s and the industry is none the wiser.

It was at Point Cook in 1985 that my 1965 inspiration from ‘The Dam Busters’ resurfaced. This led to my serious research and development of a comprehensive approach and landing training technique, later to become known as the ‘Jacobson Flare.’

In November 1987, I presented my initial findings in a paper titled ‘Where to Flare?’ at the Australian Aviation Symposium in Canberra. This new, innovative technique was based on ‘simple, unassailable aerodynamic logic‘ and the use of triangulation to define a virtual eye path to touchdown. Unlike traditional methods, my innovative new technique eliminated the need to judge the height of an invisible side of a triangle, which varies for different aircraft types. Instead, it relies on visible and quantifiable cues, making the flare point predictable, consistent, and adaptable to virtually any aircraft that flares.

One of my airline colleagues, initially sceptical, stated, “This has the elegant simplicity of the safety pin.”

Moreover, many more pilots have described my technique as ‘quantifying what pilots have long been trying to do, by guesswork and repetition.’

The Jacobson Flare App for iOS

In 2012, I collaborated with Jamie Durrant, Director of Essentials Magazine and Multimedia, to create a new chapter in the Jacobson Flare story. Together, we developed the Jacobson Flare App for iOS, which was released in June 2014. The app provides a step-by-step guide to implementing the technique. The Jacobson Flare is easily accessible to pilots worldwide.

The app is praised for its design, functionality, and presentation. It has earned respect from thousands of pilots in over 80 countries. Recognised by industry leaders, the Jacobson Flare Pty Ltd was shortlisted as a finalist for the prestigious Innovation Awards of Aerospace Australia at the Avalon Airshow in 2015.

For the full stories behind this post, I invite you to click the following links: Captain DM Jacobson and The Jacobson Flare Story.

And please, do stay tuned for Part 3, which will highlight the unique advantages of the Jacobson Flare.

 

Wishing you many safe landings

 

Captain David M Jacobson FRAeS MAP

 

Would you care to experience ,more often, that unsurpassed sense of accomplishment, derived from executing consistently beautiful landings?

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