Originally Posted by
Pace
BPF
The person I right seated in the Seneca was An experienced pilot yet seemed unable to be anything but an unwilling passenger to the intensifying bucks the aircraft was making.
To me it shows something lacking in training that a pilot gets in a situation slightly out of normal and fails to know what to do.
A go around with a bucking aircraft goes against all your instincts which is to stop.
Anyway I am not an instructor
You raise a few good points here. The first is the propensity for nose wheel first landings vary by type. The Seneca, especially the early Seneca 1's, without the elevator bob weight, are easy to land nose wheel first especially with full flap and a forward C of G. You can get into the situation where even the application of full up elevator in the flare will not stop a 3 point or even slight nosewheel first touchdown. When I check pilots out in the aircraft this is one area I pay a lot of attention to. Personally if the runway is long I make every landing with only first stage flap as it makes it much easier to flare and I also try to manage the load so that the C of G is aft of the mid range.
However the original poster was talking about an accident in a C 152 an aircraft an aircraft where it is very easy to achieve a tail low touchdown. In addition by the time you get to be PIC of a aircraft in the class of a Seneca you will normally bring considerably more flying experience to the table then your average person flying a C 152. From my point of view it is reasonable to expect the response to a problem to vary according to the experience level of the pilot. For a Seneca level of experience not being able to fix an inadvertent nosewheel first touchdown by being able to transition to a the proper touch down attitude in the flare represents an unacceptably low level of skills. For ab initio student or a low hour PPL the case is not as cut and dried. Yes they
should be able to fix the situation but the penalty for getting it wrong is going to be bent metal, as is well demonstrated by the accident statistics. There is no penalty for just going around and pretty much invariably the next landing will be a proper tail low one because the pilot will do a better jib of flying the approach after the wakeup call of the nosewheel hit.
One of the reasons we seem to take opposite sides on many issues is that you approach the level of what could be called "mandatory" skills from what to me is the level of an experienced pilot. This approach is certainly correct for those pilots but does IMO address the reality for low timers. For them I feel strongly that a preventative approach to difficult situations is the usually the best response, but their actions will gradually turn more proactive as they gain experience.
The accident stats for nosewheel first landings is fact. Telling pilots to not do that and if they do transition to the proper nose high attitude while in the flare is what we teach now
and it is not working. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that a new approach is need and so I teach
my ab initio students and new low time PPL's to go around after any nosewheel first touchdown.
However don't get me wrong. We are both in total agreement that every pilot should aspire to attaining and maintaining a high level of handling skills. The difference I think is that unlike you, I have to deal with inexperienced pilots and so I am maybe more cognizant of the
art of the possible when teaching low time pilots, as well as knowing that good advanced flying skills only happen after a pilot has mastered the fundamental basic handling skills and so those should be the emphasis during ab initio training