I gotta disagree - I never bent one, but it is not/not an uncommon event for a 182 to have a pranged firewall; sure, the pilot has to mess up, but the airplane does have a proclivity for that kind of damage to occur when a pilot gets behind. And it doesn't take an "idiot" level IQ to make it happen; just some lack of proficiency, maybe too high a sink rate, etc. The airplane handles like a truck, and the control harmony sucks - it has its good points, for sure - but one of the compromises in the design leaves it prone to firewall damage.
It happened twice with 182s in CAP in Maryland, as I recall; one was basically a controlled crash - check pilot let the left seater get a little too far behind. The other wasn't noticed until an annual. I don't inspect the firewalls on the local rental fleet, so I can't know about those.
Every one I’ve seen, and I’m more than happy to see one that wasn’t this, was like you said, a “controlled crash” where the nose gear hit first.
In any sort of flare at all even if the nose gear comes slapping down hard, the piston is going to take up most of that force after the very rugged mains have already hit hard and taken a bunch of it also.
The wrinkling is usually a deformity that looks like the nose gear was trying to be pried away from the firewall by its own leverage and worse at the top than bottom. The firewall acts like a hinge of sorts at the bottom and the top of the strut tries to pull away at the top.
I suppose you could get such a HUGE sink rate that the strut would show deformity more in line with a straight up and down slam, but it’s a lot harder to do. That sink rate would be VERY high.
I know my note may have been a but hyperbolic but my point I was trying to stress strongly is that USUALLY if you at least flare at all or don’t do something like overflare and start a stall a number of feet in the air, allowing the nose to drop rapidly so it hits first, the 182 firewall isn’t exactly weak like fragile china or something. It’s the driving the nosegear into the ground first that usually gets it.
As far as control harmony and all that goes, the yoke can be “heavy” if the aircraft isn’t trimmed, and as airspeed slows the 182 needs BIG control movements as the controls become less and less effective, which is the common mistake new pilots make in a 182. They’re used to flying a Skyhawk and while they’re not exactly fighter jets either, they don’t realize the controls need bigger and further movement as the airflow goes away in a 182.
The controls and their feel are very “honest” and not really heavy in aileron, but that big yoke and need to whip that thing a long way when at low air speeds as you touch down if you encounter a gust, or change in crosswind, etc... tends to catch new 182 pilots by surprise. It needs a lot of input just a couple seconds after it needs very little input... you’re gingerly flaring and if the bottom falls out due to a wind shift or crosswind, it takes a whole bunch of control movement right NOW to stop the unwanted directional or pitch change.
Best way to get the feel for how ineffective the elevator becomes is to try to make a landing and purposefully hold the nose gear off. It can be done, but you have to give a pretty good tug at mains touchdown to pull it off. The mass of the O-470 wants to keep rotating the nose downward after the mains touch when the CG is forward, and it’s almost always forward.
Locally the CAP planes have a mandatory survival kit in the tail baggage area for mountain work and it helps a lot with making sure the mains contact first. Sucks for useful load on those T182Ts with as heavy as they are compared to mine, though. They can’t fill the tanks and fly a full three person crew most of the time, depending on size of said crew members.
At least they have the turbo to help out... most of their flying is much nearer to max gross including the 3100 lb MGTOW that I don’t have. Mine tops out at 2950 and I struggle to get it there unless it’s packed to the gills with stuff or people. There’s an STC for the later models like mine to have the 3100 lb MGTOW and a max landing weight of 2950, but we analyzed our typical missions and the main purpose of such an STC would be to stuff our long range tanks full, and have better reserves on an IFR XC into weather that requires an alternate, which isn’t a common mission for us. For the T182T, the 3100 is needed just to handle the weight of the nicer interior, G1000 and associated boxes, and the wing tank redesign away from bladder tanks. It’s a heavy truck.
The older 182s are a lot lighter and I think, less prone to the “smack the runway with the nose gear” events.
The airplane doesn’t quite have the glass jaw that many people think it does. It just has a lot of pilots that transition from 150/152/172 that don’t quite need the quick large control movements at landing speed and slower.
This is also demonstrated really well in falling leaf practice or real slow flight at MCA. The elevator and ailerons get downright sloppy that slow. It’s just hard for people to apply what they know about that to the landing phase of flight, I think.
