Three-point and wheel landings

Two landings, and they are not variations on each other. In one the stick comes all the way back and the airplane stops flying at the same instant it touches, three wheels arriving together, and if it touches before it has quit flying it will fly again, briefly, and you will have a decision to make. In the other the stick goes forward at the moment the main wheels meet the pavement, which is the opposite of everything your training has taught you, and the airplane keeps flying while it rolls with its tail in the air. Today is the whole of Phase 2. There is one lesson and it has two answers.

Read:

• FAA-H-8083-3C, Airplane Flying Handbook, chapter 13, the three-point and wheel landing discussions. Read them side by side rather than one after the other.
• Your own notes from Lesson 2, where you watched both of these flown.

Bring: written, one sentence each. What is the target attitude at touchdown for a three-point landing, and for a wheel landing? You are not expected to be right. You are expected to have committed to an answer before you fly.

1. You fly a three-point landing with the stick fully back at touchdown and all three wheels arriving together, and you keep the stick back through the rollout.
2. You fly a wheel landing with the main wheels touching first and the forward stick applied at touchdown, not before it and not after the airplane has already begun to skip.
3. You state the attitude and energy target for each before you fly it, and they are different answers.
4. You recognise a bounce and name it aloud before the instructor does.
5. You recover a small bounce and go around from a large one, and you can say afterwards which one you had and why.
6. You fly a go-around to standard: power, attitude, then cleanup, with the centreline held.
7. You land without lateral drift, or you go around.

Standard 3 carries the lesson. A pilot who can fly both landings but describes them the same way is blending them, and the blend will come apart the first time there is a crosswind.

• Stopping the stick. The stick comes back and then stays where it is while the airplane keeps slowing. It has to keep moving.
• Blending the two. A three-point flown a little fast and a wheel landing flown a little slow meet in the middle at an attitude that suits neither.
• Forward stick too early on the wheel landing. You are pushing before the wheels are loaded, which puts you back in the air.
• Forward stick too late. The airplane has already started to skip and now the push makes it worse.
• Diving at the runway. Usually a fix for being high, and it arrives at the flare with energy nobody wants.
• Not noticing lateral drift. In calm wind you will not have much. Look for it anyway, because Lesson 4 is where it stops being small.
• Wanting the landing to work out. The airplane does not care what you were hoping for.

I will say "my airplane," and I will take it, without discussion, if:

• We touch down with lateral drift that is not being corrected.
• A bounce develops and the recovery or the go-around does not start.
• The airplane arrives at the flare with energy I am not willing to land with.
• Directional control diverges on rollout beyond what your correction is arresting.
• Anything happens that I want the controls for.

Expect to hear it today more than in any other lesson. Two hours of landings in a Luscombe is a lot of touchdowns, and the ones that go wrong go wrong quickly.

VS-3-1

Type: Exemplar | Element: Three-point landing | Status: empty What it should show: touchdown with all three wheels together and the stick fully back, then the stick continuing back through the rollout. Reference Critique: not applicable for an Exemplar Clip.

VS-3-2

Type: Exemplar | Element: Wheel landing | Status: empty What it should show: main wheels touching first, forward stick applied at the moment of touchdown, tail held up through the rollout until it settles. Reference Critique: not applicable for an Exemplar Clip.

VS-3-3

Type: Error | Element: Stick back | Status: empty What it should show: a three-point where the stick stops moving, and the skip that follows. Reference Critique: to be written from the Instructor Debrief of that flight.

VS-3-4

Type: Error | Element: Wheel landing timing | Status: empty What it should show: forward stick too early, and separately too late, so the student can see that the two errors look different and are corrected differently. Reference Critique: to be written from the Instructor Debrief of that flight.

VS-3-5

Type: Error | Element: Bounce recovery | Status: empty What it should show: a bounce where the recovery is late, and how quickly the second touchdown arrives. Reference Critique: to be written from the Instructor Debrief of that flight.

Not addressed to the student.

Do not alternate the two landings early. Fly three-points until the standard is met, then switch. Alternating in the first hour is what produces the blend, and the blend is the defect this lesson exists to prevent.

Make the student commit to the attitude targets before flying. The written answer they bring is the point, not its correctness. A student who has committed to a wrong answer learns from the correction. A student who has committed to nothing learns that the instructor knows things.

Name the bounce out loud the first two times, then stop. Standard 4 requires the student to name it before you do, and they cannot get there if you keep taking the callout.

Two hours is a lot of landings. Watch for the point where fatigue starts producing errors that technique had already fixed, and stop there. A student who ends the lesson flying worse than they did in the middle of it has learned the wrong thing about their own capability.

The wheel landing is the one that transfers. It is the technique that gives them the most control in the crosswinds coming in Phase 3, and it is the one they will use most in the Luscombe afterwards. If time runs short, protect the wheel landings.

• Approach and touchdown speeds have no source for this airplane. This is a finding rather than an unread page. The Model 8E handbook gives neither. The related Light Sport handbook gives a final approach speed and a touchdown figure with flaps down, and N1302B has no flaps, so neither transfers. ../AIRCRAFT.md marks them all NOT SOURCED.
• The North Aero cockpit checklist in circulation does carry numbers for both. They are not traceable to either handbook and must not be copied into this lesson. program/check.py check 15 fails the build if they are.
• Until a figure has a source, the lesson is flown on the sight picture and the airspeed indicator's own markings. Whatever target the instructor works to stays a briefing decision and is not written into this document or onto a card until it has a source.