I have long stood in awe of the simple elegance of D P Davies' writing. With styles from his colloquial:
The piston engine needs a lot of beef in its carcass to provide the strength to cope with the high loads which are produced in the engine by the heavy reciprocating masses.
through incisive:
Do not indulge in a prolonged flare, because it wastes distance. As soon as you reasonably can put the aeroplane firmly on the ground and start the drills without delay. Wheel braking on the ground is much more effective than floating along just above the ground. A firm touch-down is necessary to bang through the water just in case aquaplaning conditions are absolutely critical when a really smooth touch-down might just be enough to induce aquaplaning. Once down, push the control column forward to get the incidence, and therefore the lift, off the wings and the weight on to the wheels. Pull full spoiler immediately to achieve the same result. Now pull full reverse thrust and hold it.
to his technically insightful:
For propeller driven aircraft the Arbitrary Landing Distances have proved generally satisfactory and the large margin applied to the dry distances has taken care of wet runways.
With jet aircraft, however, the contribution of wheel braking compared with aerodynamic retardation has increased, so that circumstances can arise when the wet runway performance is unsatisfactory.
To meet this contingency the U.K. developed the Reference Landing Distance method, to which all jet aircraft have been certificated since the 1951 B.C.A.R. were applied, and the U.S. has recently introduced an operating rule imposing an extra 15% on the landing distance required on a wet surface.
If one of my New Year's resolutions could come true, it would be write even half as well as he did.