Easy to hit nose wheel first. Just don't flare. Use a normal glide path of 3 degrees or a steeper than normal approach. Boing, boing, boing. Am I the only one that's ever experienced one of these things? I guarantee you they are white knucklers. If you try to get in to one of these things on purpose, do it at your own risk. Just remember to go around immediately if you get in to one. I have not experienced one in the Ercoupe but this is a well-known event in flying circles. I thought everyone knew about it. Bart In a message dated 8/19/2010 10:01:15 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
On 2010-08-19 7:59 AM, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) wrote: Who's landing hot? Notice from time to time, some people screw up the flare - initiate it just a tad late - and allow the nose gear to touch first. The upward force of that premature nose gear touch rotates the airplane around it's lateral axis and the mains touch with some flying speed and the airplane becomes airborne. Bart, I don't think that CAN happen if the landing gear is properly maintained. The mains should hang down at least as far, or farther, than the fully extended nose gear. In a Coupe at specifications, the only way for the nose to touch first would require a big nose-down attitude that's something akin to a dive (or a HUGE sink rate) - in that case the impact and repercussions would be extreme. In anything not resembling a crash, if the nose gear touches, so do the mains. If the mains are providing their proper support, then the landing will, at worst, be flat and final because that flat landing has nearly zero lift due to nearly zero angle of attack. If your mains are not providing proper support, only then can they let the tail go low - giving you the angle of attack needed for enough lift to make the plane be airborne. When those mains touch, the plane should be forced nose down - to that low, on-the-ground-level attitude with near-zero angle of attack. Everything else you've written (included below) follows from this landing gear issue. If your landing gear kills your angle of attack as it was designed to do, you can't lift off and you can't get into PIO. Please explain to me how your plane can develop high angle of attack from this situation? Ed The pilot, in an attempt to correct the bounce, instinctively applies forward pressure on the yoke forcing another nose wheel touch and the sequence repeats except this time with a bigger bounce. Subsequent control inputs become a half cycle out of phase the and bounce becomes more exaggerated. That is a true JC maneuver (slang) or "pilot-induced-oscillation" (PIO). You haven't lived until you've been in one of those. I witnessed one in 1961 in a T-33 and we flew out of it. The corrective action, by the way, is to go around immediately. If you ride it out, you are either going to crash or at the least crunch the nose gear and firewall. Pants on the ground Hat turned around Bart
