thank you
Very informative,
and hard work.
My theory on pilot error landing accidentals, rigidly followed by me.
A landing is destined to br good or bad three miles outside the marker. At the three mile mark all checklists should be complete except for gear down. Fuel tank selection should be set at least 10 minutes earlier.
Approach speed should be exact and stable, approach flaps should be set, power settings appropriate for final approach airspeed stabilized for final approach (mentioned twice for emphasis). Lights down and on, and nothing left but to drop the gear at the outer marker and a very minor fiddling with power for wind shear.
Keeping the speed up and hotdogging it to the marker just to please some approach control that doesn’t care to space aircraft properly will lead to a bad landing.
I believe a lot of bad weather landing accidents are caused by not following the above requirements.
I’m not a pilot but worked on several airports I had designed projects for. One day I was working on extending the safety zone from 700 feet to the required 1,000 feet at the Klamath Falls Airport. The Oregon Air National Guard operated a squadron of F-15s at that base and so we were used to them flying directly overhead of us on take-off and landings.
One day a about 4 of these planes were coming in for landing right above us when one them stalled. I would estimate that he was no more than a couple hundred feet above us when I saw the plane just drop like a rock and I don’t how the pilot got control in that split second other than to punch it but it was a pretty scary sight.
In my experience working on USAF vs USN airfields, the USAF pilots take off and land like their flying commercial jets. Long take offs and long landings. USN pilots do everything within a couple thousand feet even though their runways are 8,000 feet or longer, obviously because their used to carrier operations. But those USAF guys if the runway is 10,000 feet their going to use every inch.