Whether you’re a student pilot or a seasoned professional, the Jacobson Flare ESSENTIAL App for iOS is the answer to making better landings. Here’s how the Jacobson Flare can help you achieve consistently more competent and more confident landings, through a better understanding of all aspects of the approach and landing manoeuvre: Finally, the answer to the long-awaited question, How to Land?

Improving flight safety is the principal objective of the Jacobson Flare ESSENTIAL App. It achieves this by providing pilots of all levels of flying experience with clear and simple facts to transform the ‘art’ of landing into a repeatable skill. Safety is greatly enhanced, because pilots need no longer rely solely on guesswork and feel, perception, judgment and experience – none of which can be taught. Conventionally, these attributes arrive for each student, at some indeterminate time for each individual and their competence and confidence is often quite shaky, even on airplane conversions throughout an entire career.

The pilot’s eye path is fully now defined, making the entire approach and landing manoeuvre fully visible. The Jacobson Flare is universal, quantifiable, consistent and based on sound principles, making it unassailable.

To land an airplane consistently well, a pilot should be able to explain the following five questions which, in turn, finally answer the most elusive – and neglected question in all of aviation: How to land.

1. Where to aim?
2. How to aim?
3. When to flare?
4. How much to flare?
5. How fast to flare (flare rate)?

Unfortunately, it is quite rare to find a flight training manual – or even an otherwise competent flight instructor – who can explain even ONE of these questions, let alone all FIVE.

The Jacobson Flare ESSENTIAL App answers all five applying, clearly and simply, known principles and facts that enable a pilot at any level of competence and experience to finally and fully understand HOW to make safer and more consistent landings, in any airplane type. The noted, breathtaking increase in pilot competence and confidence is derived from the concept of a longitudinal and visible flare cut-off point. This longitudinal point is extremely tolerant, as any errors in the selection or identification of this runway position are greatly diminished, vertically.

These insights offer further advantages: A clearly delineated pilot eye path; standardised training and competency assessment; a meaningful reduction in total training time and costs throughout an entire career; reduced runway occupancy times; and much reduced airplane wear and tear, damage and loss.

One of the most common responses we hear from experienced pilots is something along the following lines: “The Jacobson Flare enables me, not only to troubleshoot a landing that didn’t work out, but also to explain how I just landed beautifully, this time.” With haphazard competence comes haphazard confidence – and a cycle of deterioration through to triumph develops, without the pilot ever understanding the nature of the problem.

With the Jacobson Flare ESSENTIAL App, most of the variable factors affecting perception and estimation of flare height may be discounted because pilots can fly a clearly defined eye path, from final approach through to a predictable touchdown. Then, simple triangulation principles are applied to determine a visual fix for commencement of the flare.

The result is that a great many of the variables – which could be regarded as symptomatic issues – are taken care of, automatically, instead of conscious effort being waged and wasted, trying to treat or correct them. These variables include landing with different flap settings, with their attendant variations in airplane body angle; approaching without glideslope guidance at slightly varying path angles; flying approaches to up- and down-sloping runways; and landing on runways narrower or wider than usual, which causes visual illusions which often disrupt the conventional assessment of flare height.

The technique provides a truly quantifiable explanation of the landing manoeuvre which defines the entire landing flare for any airplane from day one. With this knowledge comes something very powerful: increased competence and increased confidence in your landings. These two vital attributes of landing are inextricably linked and a lack- or a presence- thereof, in either, is self-fulfilling – for both. Which would you prefer?

Read what pilots of all levels have to say about the technique and app here.

The information and materials contained in the app are applicable to virtually any fixed-wing airplane that flares, just as the principles of flight are applicable to all types of airplane. Apart from obvious differences between airplane types such as size, weight and inertia, speed, purpose and ‘feel’, the essential difference between them is simply that the numbers just get bigger as the size increases.

The Jacobson Flare empowers pilots with skills based on fact, not legend, to perform more consistent, precise landings – even when landing with a different flap setting, a lighter or heavier airplane load and on varying runway slopes and widths. This level of expertise is achieved more quickly and with much less effort than ever before.

You can apply the principles of the approach and the landing flare to your next airplane type conversion – and the next. Examples used in the Jacobson Flare ESSENTIAL App include both light and heavy airplanes, suiting pilots of any level of experience.