Babies Cried

This article is about landings. Most pilots know, intuitively if not objectively, that good landings have almost nothing to do with good flying. Still, passengers love good landings, get worried when they experience bad ones, and pilots know that and put a lot of effort into making good ones.

Part of the problem is that even experienced travelers often don’t have any idea of the various factors that go into landings, and therefore are not very good judges of what constitutes a good landing and what doesn’t. A somewhat rough landing in gusty winds to a short, icy runway is an excellent landing: get it on, get it on firmly, start stopping it right now. A pretty good landing in calm conditions on a long runway with water on it (which has a cushioning effect) is probably just mediocre: In those conditions, Ted Striker could probably pull off a great landing.

Some airplanes are easy to land and some have reputations as being difficult. The Boeing 727 was really hard to get a good landing out of, although really awful ones were rare too. It tended to bounce. Every pilot had his or her own theory of what caused it and how to prevent it, but none were very convincing or provable. It just wanted to bounce. And if you had lots of runway and tried holding it off until you were sure you were slow enough and close enough to the ground to keep it from bouncing, it would invariably drop right out from under you with a solid crunch. The late Don Lanham, ex-Braniff 727 captain and head of the ATA training department for awhile, also one of the funniest guys I ever knew, used to say, “Just fly it on down to within a inch of the runway and let it drop in from there.”

The L-1011 was altogether different. It didn’t bounce, but landings could vary from “Are we on the ground yet?” to “Is everyone okay back there?” A big part of the problem is that it is a large, wide body aircraft. At touchdown, the cockpit is still 35 to 50 feet in the air, and “the mains”—the main landing gear, arranged in two four wheel groups called trucks—are some 90 feet behind you. Being that high up in the air, with the mains so far behind, meant a certain amount of guess work and even luck was involved. There was just no way to have a good “seat of the pants” feel for where those mains were prior to touchdown.

The 1011 had a radio altimeter which showed the height of the wheels above the ground, but you couldn’t look at it and still look out the front window, so it was hard to use in those last 50 feet. The flight engineer, who sat behind the pilots, was supposed to watch the radio altimeter for you and make call outs every 10 feet from 50 feet above on: “50, 40, 30, 20, 10.” The call outs not only told you how high you were, but the cadence gave a sense of the rate you were approaching as well. It all helped, but not all engineers were equally skilled or careful in making the call outs.

I sort of learned this by accident. (Not that kind of accident—inadvertently.) I was driving to the airport, a two hour drive early in the morning with no traffic, and I was thinking about my crew and in particular why I always seemed to have good landings with some engineers and bad ones with others. I assumed it was just luck or coincidence, because I was doing the landings and what did the engineer have to do with that, and then it hit me: He has one very important thing to do with that, he makes the call outs. That particular day my engineer was one that I often had good landings with, so I made a point of sneaking a glance at the radio altimeter as he was making the call outs, and sure enough, his call outs were right on. And I kept doing that with other engineers, and the quality of the call outs varied all over the place, from pretty good to, “Somewhere around 50 feet I guess I’m supposed to say, ’50, 40, 30, 20, 10,’” without any real correlation to reality. So I learned two things, one obvious, the quality of call outs varied, and the other less obvious but more important, that that information was vital to good landings. If the call outs were bad you were better off ignoring them, taking your chances and trusting your instincts. If they were good, you almost couldn’t make a bad landing.

The Boeing 757 presented a completely different situation, because it was a two man airplane—no flight engineer—but its radio altimeter was equipped with an automated voice call out. So accuracy of the call outs was not an issue: they were always right on. In addition, while a long aircraft, the cockpit position on touchdown was much lower so it was easier to get a visual picture that corresponded to the wheels touching down. The rule of thumb with the 757 was, “Don’t do anything until you hear ’10 feet’.” That was easier said then done though, because the ground comes up pretty fast those last 50 feet at typical approach speeds of 130 to 140 knots and at a descent rates of 650 to 700 feet per minute. At 30 feet all of your instincts are telling you to start pulling back, but that was wrong. I proved the rule to myself over and over again by getting better landings at Maui, a short runway that required you to just put it on and get it stopped, than I did at San Francisco, where the super long runways often lulled me into starting to flare too soon and then use the extra runway length to try to squeak out a good one. It almost never worked, but like the golf lesson that only seems to work on the range and never on the course, I never seemed to be able to make myself do a Maui-type landing anywhere but Maui.

One San Francisco landing in particular was memorable. Conditions were perfectly benign, a nice evening at SFO, very little wind, the flight over to and back from Hawaii had gone well, I had a good crew all around, and a lot of the passengers were regulars. One in particular I had gotten to know well because he commuted back and forth between Maui and the mainland, which many of the regulars did, but his situation was a little different because he had broken his back years earlier in a surfing accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. He needed an “aisle chair”—a skinny wheel chair that can go up and down the aisles—to take him directly to his row where he had to be lifted out of the aisle chair and into his seat. And vice versa getting off. He was just a terrific guy with absolutely no sense of self-pity about him, and I knew he was back there, had talked to him before takeoff, and I probably I wanted to pull off a really good landing for him. I certainly wasn’t aware that I was thinking that, but probably I was. In any case, for whatever reason, I still don’t know what I did wrong, but the squeak I was looking for was more like a load of bricks being dropped. Airplanes can take a lot of abuse—in flight testing they deliberately drop them in hard from 50 feet to see if anything breaks—and this wasn’t anything that bad, but it wasn’t good. It was certainly the worst landing I had ever had in a 757, and this was after flying it for a couple of years.

When those things happen you always hope that maybe, just because you are way up in the front and forces tend to get exaggerated the farther you are from the center of gravity, that maybe it wasn’t so bad in the back. Maybe you can get away with, at worst, a “Whose landing was that?” from the flight attendants. (Pilots normally alternate legs, taking turns doing the actual flying, and flight attendants know that, but don’t necessarily know whose leg it was. When they ask, its always because something was either really good or really bad.) So after the check lists were done and the log book filled out, I opened the door, and Laura, the Senior Flight Attendant, was right outside the cockpit door, laughing. Almost uncontrollably. I finally got her to calm down enough to say, “So Laura, tell me. How bad was that, really?” She said, “That was so bad, babies cried.”

I wrote in Fly Like a Pro, (Tab Books, 1985), and I quote it here because more than 20 years later I still can’t say it any better: “Exercising good judgment is really what being a good pilot is all about. But that’s not what most people think. Most people think that the physical manipulation of the controls is what being a good pilot is all about. That’s why the passengers always pay so much attention to the landing. They think that the landing is the most difficult and critical part of the flight, and if the pilot does that well, he must also do everything else well. It just isn’t so. The most difficult part of the flight is not the landing; the most difficult part is making the proper judgments so that you arrive at a point where a safe landing can be made.”

I guess my landing was safe: no one got hurt and nothing broke. Still, babies cried.