Originally Posted by
Airbubba
Years ago a lot of these personal techniques were common in my experience. Folks would add knots to the approach speed for the wife and kids. Non-standard additives would be made for wind with autothrottles in use.
Seems like some of the Air Force guys would brief 'I'm going to duck under a dot on short final since the viz is good' while landing a widebody. Was it taught in the T-38, the C-141 or the C-5 perhaps?
One of the regional carriers decades ago had a non-approved B-737 short field technique of pulling up the speedbrake handle before touchdown so that the boards would fully deploy the moment there was weight on the wheels. When a newer version of the 737 arrived, ground spoiler mode was triggered by radar altitude, the boards fully deployed before the wheels were on the runway and a hard landing mishap occurred.
In recent years, thankfully, most of these cowboy techniques seem to be less common where I've worked. However, with all the airline 'mergers' I'm sure non-standard 'we did it this way at Brand X' procedures will give the feds and the training department a lot of job security for years to come.
As I said, we used to land turboprops(no reverse by the way on the engines) on a short runway less than 3000 feet(and some that were a bit longer). Was 100% hard pack snow all winter.
Now some folks might call you a cowboy if you don't follow the official flight path all the way down and land at about 13-1500' down the runway(which has a downslope in both directions for the latter half of the rollout) because you followed the PAPI and had your 50' wheel clearance....
...but in reality, you would be a fool if you were anything but a so-called cowboy. And yes, it was done during a check flight. Some 10,000 foot plus runway guys have a hard time understanding stuff like this.