Needless to say, my confidence took a real hit today. Anyone out there have any similar stories to make me feel better.
. I can't imagine quitting this close, and I probably won't, but damn today sucked.
What you had wasn't a game-ender. It was what we like to call a "learning experience."
A Piaggio is naturally a squirrely plane on touchdown to begin with so I'm not a fan of adding speed to its already high approach speed.
If you mean the Avanti, I never found that to be the case. It's a very simple airplane that lands quite nicely.
The faster the airframe - the more you'd be biting yourself in the ass reducing flaps for gusty or crosswind conditions.
Not necessarily. We often use variable flap settings for landing, depending on several factors. We also vary the flaps for takeoff.
Even at our max landing weight, going from the second-to-last flap setting of Flaps 25, to the last one, Flaps 30, produces only a 5 knot reduction in our final speed.
One can't really compare one specific aircraft against a different aircraft, however. Nor can one compare a small aircraft with a large, swept wing aircraft. In the airplane I fly for my day job, for example, one can land in a crab; the most important thing is getting the wings level, not ensuring the long axis of the airplane is aligned. In a conventional gear airplane, getting the airplane properly aligned during landing is a lot more important than whether the wings are level. Flaps in one airplane may mean or do something entirely different. Generally in the airplane I fly, we land with flaps set for the landing data as calculated, and for the runway length, not for wind gusts, although we do apply takeoff flaps according to the wind gusts. Windshear brings a mandatory greater takeoff flap setting, for us.
In a light airplane, sometimes reduced flaps are preferable. Gusty winds, weight, aircraft type, field conditions, pilot preferences and capabilities, etc, all contribute.
In a light airplane where spoilers aren't available, raising the flaps on landing is often preferable in gusty crosswinds; this puts more weight on the gear and makes the airplane less susceptible to gusts. It makes the brakes more effective, and reduces the chances of flat-spotting the tires in aircraft without antiskid. Some airline types have a fit about raising the flaps before clearing the runway, but it's a valid, viable technique that I've often used in light aircraft in gusty conditions and on rough fields (to protect the flaps). It's also a very common practice when landing some conventional gear (tailwheel) aircraft; it gets the tailwheel down faster and makes the all-important transition from airplane to ground vehicle.
I've had company policies allowing or preferring reduced flap landings under certain circumstances.
Nope. TAFs are an educated weather-guesser's best guess. Every weather-guesser has a bad day or three.
Try this sometime. Most local news is really just regurgitated NWS forecasts. Track for two weeks how many times they absolutely NAIL the forecast, including wind speed. Or just track it via a cheap NOAA All-Hazards radio.
The failure rate is close to 70% around here. If I had a failure rate that high in my day job, I'd be fired.
TAFs and other predictive weather products are based on computerized world data models, as well as local inputs. Globally, I find that forecasts tend to be quite accurate, for the most part.
We predicate our dispatch landing performance and most of what we do on the accuracy of forecasts, including winds-aloft information, and you might be surprised to learn just how accurate it tends to be.
