Evo7. I’m at a similar stage to yourself, 17 hours in the C152, with 3 hours of solo circuits. In at least 50 touch & goes, I’ve managed 1 greaser (I never even felt the mains touch), about half a dozen bounced go-arounds (3 of them on my first solo!) and a similar number of crunchers. The rest were somewhere in the middle. The one thing common to all of them was that the wheels stayed on.
The problem - as others have said - is that however many books you read, its still a completely new experience that can only be learnt by practice. My favourite trick was aiming at the numbers then starting the flare at either 150’ or 2’ – interesting, either way. I think I was a bit unnerved, firstly by what looked like this very short piece of tarmac rushing up at me, and every instinct screaming ‘pull up, you’re going to crash’, and secondly the urge to land and stop as quickly as possible. (After about the 10th time I touched down convinced we were going to go off the end, only to stop with half the runway remaining, I started to relax a bit).
As you work at it though, you’ll start to develop a picture of what looks right, and particularly the knack of transferring your aiming point from the numbers to the far end of the runway, then flying just above the surface until you hear rubber on tarmac. (i.e. Don’t try and fly it onto the runway – fly it along the runway & it’ll land itself).
One more point – watch your approach speed. I was initially using 70kts, which keeps you miles away from the stall, but ensures you arrive at the threshold with loads of unwanted energy. Reducing it to 65kts on finals and 55-60kts in the flare will make life a lot easier.
I’ll leave the last word to a KLMUK F100 captain who kindly let me have the jumpseat; “This one won’t be a good landing – I’m doing it."
