Airframe icing today.. poor landing. coincedence?
Bit of a strange one this. We were flying today from down south back up north, C 172 and I was flying in IMC for a large part of the journey (1.2 hr flying ish). So the forecast said there was potential icing and it seemed it could have gone up to 10,000ft from what my copilot read (FI, 6000+ hours on small and big planes). We were at around 4,000ft-5000ft and this was because routing necessitated it.
So we kept a close eye on it and maybe 45 minutes in some ice was spotted under the wings and from there it built up quite fast, not badly on the leading edge but the strut was quite affected and various other parts (pitot, steps etc ) Pitot heater worked however. So we commenced descent as climbing out of it was not an option. Windshield was heavily iced over at this stage.
Descent was uneventful and we popped out of the muck at around 1800 feet, ice was visibly melting.
Runway came into site soon after and I put it down (maybe 3 minutes since out of cloud).
The plane seemed to be a bit wooly on landing and I ended up hooning in a bit quick and where I was expecting it to hold the flare it seemed to drop (no stall warner) and a bounce and then I caught it on the next bounce.
My question, is it possible that ice on the airframe somewhere could have contributed or I just screwed up?? I am puzzled about it because normal landings are nice and predictable and I haven't done a bounce for some months!!! thanks
Last edited by anderow; 15th Mar 2015 at 23:17.