Learning Manual Landings

[Lukemeister 0]

Hi all,

 

I can fly the PMDG 737NGX fine. My only shortcoming is that I have to have an ILS CAT III landing or I can't land the plane. For instance if I disengage the autopilot at around 100ft agl, the plane just seems to have way too much lift and I just start gaining altitude, a bit like a feather in the wind!! so to be able to land on the main gear is nearly impossible as I have to pile the nose into the runway to even land the thing!

 

Does anyone know, or can anyone recommend how I can practise these landings and achieve them properly?

 

Thanks.

[LeeL 272]

Start with a alley plane maybe.

 

You have to learn the basics, use the FSX tutorials maybe

 

Are you configured properly for landing?

 

Lee

[Paul_Smith 92]

Don't leave it to 100ft to take over.

 

Run the tutorials a couple of times until you are comfortable with what needs to be done and when. (If you have time, it is worth putting the effort into understanding the why).

 

Watch the AP land the plane a few times and pay attention to when it reduces power, drops flaps etc. then turn to AP off about 10 miles out, and follow the flight directors in. Remember that you need to be ahead of the plane, not behind it. That means instead of reacting to what has already happended, you know what you are going to do next, and what effect it will have.

[johnsturm 22]

Make sure you are matching the throttle position on your controller to the thrust currently set by the auto throttle before disengaging it. That will prevent you from having a large change in thrust when you disengage. There is an option in the Aircraft Setup of the FMC to display the hardware throttle position on the engine display to make this a little easier.

 

When you are ready to take over manually disengage both the autopilot and the auto throttle. Adjust your thrust and pitch attitude to keep the aircraft on the glideslope your speed at Vref + 5. When you get to about 20 feet over the runway slowly reduce throttle to idle and add about 2 degrees of pitch to the nose for the flare.

[scandinavian13 5,192]

Hey Luke,

 

The first step in landing a plane is coming to the understanding that landings by hand are the way landings are done. "Manual landing" is a term I'd like to take out back with a shotgun, particularly after answering all the questions from friends and family about this Asiana accident (mostly all related to aircraft being able to land themselves, which is seldom used, or the pilot being reliant on the ILS for reference). Sorry for the side rant, but it's my personal mission to kill this trend in the sim realm.

 

In order to be able to land well, you must be able to actually fly the plane. I'm not talking about telling the autopilot to fly the plane for you; rather, I'm talking about actually getting the yoke in your hand and being able to feel how the plane responds to you. You will not get this in the last 100' of flight, and there's a lot more to it than understanding that the ailerons (along with the rudder) turn you, and the elevator and thrust makes you climb and descend.

 

Instead of doing the old "revenue service flight" (from point to point), put yourself in the PMDG livery, give yourself a good 10,000 pounds of fuel, a normal passenger load, and fly the pattern. Take off, climb out, level off at 2000' above the field elevation, turn around, fly parallel to the runway, continue past the other end of the runway (by about 5-10nm), and then turn back inbound to land. Make sure to turn weather off, and fly all of that by hand.

 

Here's the catch:

Even if you plant the aircraft into the ground at the end of all of that, you will have gained that hand feel that is so important in all landings. One thing that you will want to do is assign as trim up and trim down command on your yoke. If you have two buttons (ideally two where one is above the other), set them to the trim up/trim down commands in FSX. This way, you can keep the plane in trim so that you're not battling the aircraft's want to climb/descend based on your flaps and airspeed.

 

Things to think about:

-It is not your aim to make it look pretty - especially on your first attempts.

-DO NOT tune the ILS frequency. Use the approach path indicator lights to gauge how high you are. Trying to chase the ILS indications isn't going to help you at all in landing the plane. You need to be concentrating on keeping the aircraft stable, and seeing how your inputs make the plane react, not chasing after needles.

-Pay attention to your reference speeds. You want to be at about VREF+5 (in the no-wind situation I mentioned earlier.)

-Watch the autopilot fly a coupled approach to an autoland, and pay very close attention to what it is doing. It'll do just about everything you need to do to land the plane yourself. Watch what the picture out the window looks like.

 

The problem with this simism of flying coupled approaches and autolands all the time is that you don't get the hand time. Nobody expects a six year old to grab a pencil and paper and have pretty handwriting. Actually, we expect that the six year old will have rather terrible handwriting. Only through actual hand practice does this skill improve. So, pick up the pencil and do a little handwriting of your own.

 

To be honest, we're having this same discussion in the real world as well:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kREPMzMLk

[g_precentralis 191]

Practice with small aircraft first.

[Rocky_53 1,579]

Following on from what Kyle said, I know we're all different (thank goodness) but I fail to understand the challenge of conducting an ILS landing in full AP, when in the real world, manual landings are the norm and not the other way round. In fact, I have to hold my hand up and say that I have not, to date, conducted  a single auto landing in my NGX!! FWIW, I disengage the AP once on the final approach, usually about five miles out.

[cannonplug 126]

Hi Kyle,

 

I hope you don't mind me jumping in here.

 

I can definitely appreciate what you're saying: that in order to have the full experience of flight, one needs to learn how to fly the plane without automation. But this doesn't take into account the many different motivations people have for simming. I, for one, love the systems and their interaction. I also like sitting on my recliner with my laptop (or two laptops: one for the addons). This makes it rather difficult to have a proper controller for flying. I use a little gaming controller with two miniature joysticks that aren't exactly conducive to precision flying. And yet I get everything I want out of the experience, even though autolanding is all I ever do.

 

I sim for the pure fantasy of it all. While some strive for 100 % realism, I simply do it to find myself in other lands and in part to relive some of the aspects that I did enjoy when I fixed planes. Some will fly nothing but real routes with real planes. I fly my Guppy that someone was nice enough to repaint in Swiss colors all over the world. Swiss don't have 737s, nor do they fly from Portland to San Jose. :-) And yet I don't think I love the experience any less.

 

So even I ask myself what the point is of my post. I realize that Luke was just asking for pointers on how to land the airplane. I guess I felt this was as good a place as any to convey to those of you who don't dive fully into flying that you're not alone.

 

Best,

 

Walter

[G550flyer 1,013]

Hey luke, since my early flying days in the military i've been a technical flyer. In the Airforce we had many formulas and techniques to achieve optimum landings.  Personally, I feel the NGX is a bit too slippery. I currently fly the G5/550 RW and it's as slippery as you can get. So slippery that you have to pull to idle at 100ft to keep her from floating. As slippery as it is, it out performs the NGX in idle descents. Now i'm comparing a real world jet to a simulated one, but it gives you an idea of the aerodynamics in the NGX. With that in mind, here's what you can do for the NGX. First, use the HUD. The first time I used a HUD was in the G5. It was akward and obstructive at first, but I grew to love it. There are performance cues and a flight path vector to help when hand flying. There's a 3 degree line that you can drag and place over the runway to get a 3 degree glide path. The performance indicator gives you engine power to selected airspeed information. Finally, just like the G5 there is a flare cue that is accurate as long as you load the threshold elevation.  If you use automation or not, main thing is to be stable by 500ft agl. On speed, on glide path with very minor maneuvering/ throttle movement. This technique is based on flaps 30 in the 800.

 

1. Put the flight path vector right on your aim point(1000ft down the runway). Use small inputs to prevent overshooting and chasing the vector.

2. Around 200ft to 100ft, disconnect automation.

3. Between the 30ft and 20ft call out, reduce to idle and smoothly raise the nose to reach 4 to 4.5 pitch just prior to touch down.(roughly 2 degrees added to app pitch attitude)

 

This should put you down between 1000 to 1500 down. If you find that you are floating further down, decrease the pitch half a degree. The closer you pitch to 5 degrees, the longer you will float.

This technique will get some good results. Practice makes perfect. After a few circuits here and there, you will not need the HUD.

 

Rich

[scandinavian13 5,192]

 

 

And yet I get everything I want out of the experience, even though autolanding is all I ever do.

I sim for the pure fantasy of it all. While some strive for 100 % realism, I simply do it to find myself in other lands and in part to relive some of the aspects that I did enjoy when I fixed planes. Some will fly nothing but real routes with real planes. I fly my Guppy that someone was nice enough to repaint in Swiss colors all over the world. Swiss don't have 737s, nor do they fly from Portland to San Jose. :-) And yet I don't think I love the experience any less.

 

The difference is that you see that there's a step back from the realism there.  You're flying to what you'd want to get out the sim.  I have a feeling you understand that autolanding every time, while convenient, is not a common practice.  Reading the forums, however, it seems that most believe that it's almost the exception that the pilot lands the plane.  Why else would someone say "manual landings," as if "manual" were the exception?  And I can't blame them, because as the presenter in that video states several times over, we created that.  We created it (as an aviation community) either through being inattentive, or somehow more directly.

 

I'm just trying to push a more active stance on things like this.  We can't have potential future aviators growing up to be dependent on this sort of stuff.  The amount of people trying to tell me that the pilots involved in the Asiana accident couldn't land without the ILS showed me that it's a lot worse than I thought.

[JonFly 7]

Do you have a yoke? If so youre trim may be interfering with your pitch on the landing..... Take Autopilot off and see if you can flight straight and level at a higher altitude.

[mikea76 184]

Hi all,

 

I can fly the PMDG 737NGX fine. My only shortcoming is that I have to have an ILS CAT III landing or I can't land the plane. For instance if I disengage the autopilot at around 100ft agl, the plane just seems to have way too much lift and I just start gaining altitude, a bit like a feather in the wind!! so to be able to land on the main gear is nearly impossible as I have to pile the nose into the runway to even land the thing!

 

Does anyone know, or can anyone recommend how I can practise these landings and achieve them properly?

 

Thanks.

 

That's a pretty significant shortcoming. 

 

All I can say is make sure your controls are setup properly and practice a lot,  I did quite a few touch and goes with the NGX when it first came out. 

[Lukemeister 0]

Thanks guys, luckily I have a seperate throttle and joystick so it's a bit easier.

 

I have found I can land pretty well if I disengage the autopilot once I enter the glideslope/localiser area. I keep the autothrottle on to keep a steady speed as I descend and line up by hand, I set engines to idle as I cross the threshold and my plane brings itself down nicely as I flare and hit the centerline . I guess what I was doing wrong was trying to take control in the very final moment of the flight. As a result of flying Airbus I thought that reducing throttle to idle would disengage the autothrottle but clearly it doesn't. No wonder I was floating.

 

 

I'm gonna keep practising flying manual circuits.

 

With Ryanair, for instance, how many of their landings will be "fully manual"?

 

Thanks

[James Bennett 52]

Don't be afraid to fail some, you're in the sim. You will not learn to hand fly the aircraft without first crashing a few times and learning what the incorrect technique is. If you've never crashed it, how will you know what inputs will crash it when it comes to a non training flight?

 

Lukemeister, on 15 Jul 2013 - 7:10 PM, said: With Ryanair, for instance, how many of their landings will be "fully manual"? Thanks

 

Almost all in good conditions will be "fully manual".

[Andrea1 6]

Hi to all,

as Scandinavian has well explained learning manual landing is paramount...is a necessary skill for an airline pilot...

to which using are used to autoland everytime  I'd like to ask a simple question...what would you do if, for any reason, autoland would fail? Could you execute a manual landing and save your's and the others 180 souls you've just behind of you? If the answer is "maybe or "problably" you need a lot of training..'cause in the world of pro-pilots "maybe" or "problably" are not acceptable

answers...you're a pro and have to take 180 people from A to B in a safely manner...otherwise manual landings are amusing...every now and then you can be wrong on "timing" so arriving to an "hard landing" sometimes a little "harder" but also in real life it can happen...using always autoland it's very frustating...

Best Regards

 

Andrea Buono