Spring is almost here- are you looking forward to landing on soft fields again? If you’ re planning to touch down on a grass or dirt strip soon, it’ s time to brush up on your soft-field landing skills. Here’ s how you’ ll do it.
How Soft Field Landings Are Different
Soft field landings are pretty much the same as normal landings until you cross the runway threshold. That’ s where you need to put your soft field landing technique into place. So what are the steps of a good soft field landing? We’ ll break it down into three phases: approach to landing, touchdown, and rollout. Approach To Landing To make a great soft field landing, you need to start with a stabilized approach. Being stabilized ensures that you touch down where you want, and that you transfer your aircraft’ s weight from the wings to the wheels as gently as possible.
You should fly your traffic pattern the same as a normal landing. The
Airplane Flying Handbook recommends flying your final approach with full flaps at 1.3 Vso, unless your POH recommends a different configuration and speed.
The difference between a normal and soft field landing really comes into play once you cross the runway threshold. That’ s because as you get close to touchdown, you want to hold the aircraft 1-2 feet off the runway in ground effect.
By holding your plane off the runway, you dissipate your forward speed, and allow your wheels to touch down at a slower speed. This is important for a very good reason: it reduces the noseover force on your aircraft when it touches down.
Touchdown Next up is the moment you and your passengers have been waiting for: touchdown. As you enter ground effect, you can use a small amount of power to level off and make sure you touchdown as slow as possible( though power isn’ t necessary).
Your goal is to fly the airplane to the ground, with your wings supporting the weight of the aircraft as long as possible. Making this happen in a low-wing vs. high-wing aircraft can vary significantly. Lowwing aircraft will have more pronounced ground effect because the wing is closer to the ground, and it may not take as much power manipulation than it will to keep a high-wing aircraft in ground effect.
After your main wheels touch down gently( nice landing, by the way), you want to slowly remove power, if you had any in, and hold the nose wheel off the runway.
Rollout Since your main gear are much stronger than the nose wheel, you want to keep the nose off the soft / rough surface until your plane