Practical advice for mastering landings in those pre-solo hours. Applying the same techniques used by sports psychologists in activities that require a high degree of hand-eye coordination and advanced motor skills, like those found in gymnastics and baseball, Doug Daniel tells you how to improve your landing skills by visualization.
She said, "I'm having trouble with landings." Then she asked, "Is there any practice away from the plane I can do?"
Well, yes there is. It is remarkably cost effective. I recommend it to all my students. Here it is: Think about landings.
This technique may sound pretty crazy, but twice in my life it worked miracles for me. One was learning to ski and the other was learning to land an airplane. In both cases, my instructor said something to the effect that he could not believe that I was the same student who he saw floundering during the previous lesson. Sports such as gymnastics and baseball that require advanced motor skills use the same technique. Here is how it helped me with landings and taxiing:
I was learning to fly in a 65-HP J-3 Cub and could not even taxi without driving off onto the grass. My flying was OK, but once on the ground, my directional control was awful. That night I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about flying. I imagined that I was in the cockpit, moving my feet on the rudder pedals. I kept stomping on a rudder pedal too late and too hard. Then I would step on the pedal too long. I replayed in my mind everything that I had done right and wrong. I discovered that I was moving my hands and feet as I visualized the airplane's response. I went through this mental exercise repeatedly until, in my mind, I had the airplane under control. Amazingly, by the time I flew the next day, I new what I had to do. In a way, that should not have been surprising, my instructor had told me how, demonstrated the proper technique, told me what I was doing wrong and had me feel the controls as he flew. So it was all in my brain, I just had to get it all sorted out in my mind.
In my case, having mastered directional control, landings fell into place.
The essence of this technique is to imagine that you are in the pilot's seat, visualize the out-the-window scene, feel your hands and feet on the controls, hear the airplane in your mind and to the greatest degree possible, transport yourself into this virtual cockpit. Remember exactly what the outside world looked like when your instructor demonstrated a landing and visualize yourself in the same circumstances. Think about your botched landings; analyze them until you are convinced that you know what you did wrong and how you should have done it. Then mentally do it right and mentally recover from the botched landings before your airplane would have touched down.
It is not easy to know just how high you are above the runway. Yet you know what the world looks like when you taxi. Mentally add a foot to that, and that is what you should see before you land.
One final bit of advice about mentally landing that applies equally to the real thing: Don't land the airplane; let it land itself. I have had several students struggle with this concept. They believed that there was some specific action that the pilot did that caused the airplane to land right then. Not so. It does not matter if you are doing attitude landings or full stall landings, the airplane lands when it is ready. If you try to make it land sooner, it will bite you.
So as you visualize your way to better landings, remember that you move the controls to attain and maintain the attitude you want. Your focus must be on attitude and certainly not control position. You must see the proper attitude in your mind or will not succeed in controlling the airplane when flying the real thing, so you certainly must see the proper attitude in the virtual world of your mind when you visualize landings away from the airplane.
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