Towering structures need a proper framework
When landing a light airplane, at an approach ground speed of, say 80 kts, a 2nm approach from 600ft will occupy just 90 seconds; a jet transport on a 3nm approach from 900ft, at an approach ground speed of, say 150 kts, will occupy just 72 seconds, with the flare itself, adding a further 5-6 seconds in each case.
That’s not a long time, each time, to attempt to ‘get the hang of it’ simply through guesswork and repetition. Judgment cannot be taught and takes its own time to develop, for each individual pilot.
Conventionally, we just keep attempting to correct our own corrections, as we stumble towards the landing. This takes only 5-6 seconds and the landing cannot be adequately mastered in 5-6 sec repetitive ‘grabs’, during a series of circuits, spread over many sessions – in variable conditions, each time – until competency is judged to be safe enough to permit landing operations as pilot-in-command. This sequence of events applies not only to student pilots approaching their first solo: It applies also to experienced pilots undergoing airplane type conversions. It can continue through an entire career. Yet it needn’t.
In so many other applications in the wonderful world of aviation, frameworks exist to make a procedure easier, consistent and safer. There are guidelines painted on taxyways and tarmacs, to assure clearance from other aircraft and obstacles; there are nose-in lighting guidance systems to aid docking at a terminal ‘gate’ or airbridge. There are formal checklists and informal ‘mnemonics’, such as PAT (‘power, attitude, trim’ to support the correct sequence to transition from straight and level flight into a climb); and APT (‘attitude, power, trim’, to transition back to straight and level flight).
The 1943 RAF 617 Sqn ‘Dambusters’ used simple triangulation twice, in the one operation: Use of belly-mounted spotlights and a very simple bomb sight enabled their ‘skipping bomb’ to be released at precisely 60 ft/18 m above water (at night) and at the correct distance back from each of the dam walls of 2 reservoirs in the Ruhr valley, in Western Germany.
It is this very framework that led to my inspiration – as an 18-yo student pilot at YMMB Moorabbin, VIC, Australia – to apply this simple triangulation in resolving the above-mentioned limitations of conventional landing training.
And, thanks to this framework, the Jacobson Flare towers above all other landing training methods.
Wishing you many safe landings
Captain David M Jacobson FRAeS MAP
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