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Old 07-23-2006 | 03:14 PM
  #16  
amjflyer
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From: Buckingham, UNITED KINGDOM
Default RE: LANDING TECHNIQUES ???

Im no expert however i will share the advice i was given with you and it has worked very well with me. Although I would add that I fly just about everything that aviates (gliders, jets, hotliners, electric, 3d, pattern, giant scale etc) and jets are by far the hardest fixed wing aircraft to land nicely due to in general their very high wing loading and high energy on approach, there is also the small matter of spool up times on turbines to get you out of any 'errors'. The advice i was given was to simply follow full size practice. Now this does generally work better with the bigger models that will stand a high-ish alpha landing whereas many small models (due to Reynolds factors) will not. So to follow full size practice you need to set yourself up an approach and 'fly by the numbers' at given markers, ie half throttle on entry into landing pattern, 1/3 throttle on base leg, half throttle on crosswind leg, and then on finals set approach angle to 5deg nose up, throttle set to maintain glide slope (to whatever works, sometimes this is idle on a prop job, this may take a little jockeying, and once you know what it is you could program it into a switch), at about 1-2ft above the runway start the flare, chop the throttle to idle and keep deepening the flare and holding back on the stick until mains and then finally nose leg gentley touches down. Alot of non-jet or large scale pilots disengage brain at this point and then things go wrong on the roll-out. Until the airplane has come to a complete stop (wherever that should be) you are still flying it, stay on the rudder, elevator and brakes managing them all until the aircraft is at a full stop. I cant count the number of times ive seen people switch off and flip the model over at the last minute due to lack of concentration and thinking the landing job was prematurely done.