Airline Greasers

[spiderweb]

I fly the airlines (unfortunately) about 20 trips a year. Almost every landing ranges from "heavy thud" to "smack down." Those airline pilots, as we all well know, fly nearly every day.

Now to GA: I and the pilots with whom I've flown usually get a far higher percentage of smooth landings, and definitely more greasers. Except for the CFIs, we do NOT fly every day.

So, I guess airliners are just too hard to land smoothly. Maybe Boeings and Airbuses should be equip their landing gear with some sort of memory-foam inserts!

 

[Jim Logajan]

I fly the airlines (unfortunately) about 20 trips a year. Almost every landing ranges from "heavy thud" to "smack down." Those airline pilots, as we all well know, fly nearly every day.

Now to GA: I and the pilots with whom I've flown usually get a far higher percentage of smooth landings, and definitely more greasers. Except for the CFIs, we do NOT fly every day.

So, I guess airliners are just too hard to land smoothly. Maybe Boeings and Airbuses should be equip their landing gear with some sort of memory-foam inserts!

I know there are jet pilots who have already responded, but see if you can get your hands on a copy of "Takeoffs and Landings" by Leighton Collins and read the section "The Airlines' Approach" in chapter 8. In it he discusses jet "no flare" landings and noted:

"At any rate, the big jets do hit hard much of the time, or at least hard if you're sitting over the wheels rather than in the nose. On one of my few domestic airline flights, to Alaska a year or so ago, I didn't see a soft landing anywhere along the line. They were all very much on the hard side, some alarmingly so. Which tells me that the big ones, while maybe less so with their higher approach speeds, are still subject to the atmospheric ups and downs that our small airplanes experience in exaggerated forms."