To Ryanair Pilots: What is wrong with the landings?

[G SXTY]

RYRnick

With all due respect, most passengers don't have a clue what constitutes a 'good' landing. Large aircraft travel very quickly and have lots of inertia. As a result, the safest landing technique is to achieve a stable approach in terms of airspeed and rate of descent, and to fly the aircraft onto the runway in the right place and at the right speed. A silky smooth touchdown is not the aim of the game - in fact it can sometimes be positively unsafe.

Sat in the back, you cannot assess the crosswind or airspeed, let alone whether or not an approach is stable, and you certainly can't see the touchdown zone markings. You don't know the traffic conditions, how close the aircraft behind is, or whether there is one to roll in the gap. You don't know if ATC have imposed a speed control on us. You don't know the landing distance available, or the location and type of runway exits. All you have to go on is the touchdown itself. I have known passengers thank the pilots for "a lovely smooth landing" after a high speed approach that was borderline unstable. Or be impressed by a smooth touchdown after an excessively long float that resulted in the aircraft using virtually all of the (fairly short) runway. But a positive arrival at the correct speed in the touchdown zone, and there will be at least one expert in the back who thinks that the pilots don't know what they are doing. I have known one passenger complain to the cabin crew after a perfectly executed wing-down landing, because "the pilot landed at the wrong angle."

I am fairly new to flying airliners (on a type, incidentally, which is even trickier than the 738 to land smoothly) but I have enough experience to know that landing them is more of a black art than an exact science. And that captains with 20,000hrs experience are just as capable of 'planting it' as 250hr pilots in line training.

I've had quite a few sectors in the back of Ryanair aircraft (although not the millions that you have), and in my opinion as a professional pilot, the average RYR landing is no better or worse than any other airline flying comparable aircraft on comparable runways.