Judging height.

[Rockie]

Looking at the far end of the runway keeps you from focusing on one particular spot closer in which makes it much more difficult to determine rate of descent relative to the earth. It's actually peripheral vision judging relative speed, rate of closure and angular change for me. The farther down the runway I cast my gaze the more peripheral information is available to complete the picture, and if you were to look closely at me you would probably swear my eyes were glazed over because I'm not looking at any one thing. Works for me anyway.

Interestingly, I once taught a monocular farm kid how to fly. He had spent his whole life compensating for his lack of depth perception so it came naturally to him, and of course he was used to operating machinery. Showed him how to land once and never had to show him again.

[Chaxterium]

When I was learning to land the Dash 7 I was told to wait until my butt cheeks clench...and then wait an extra second and then flare. Seems to do the trick!

I've been told many times to look at the end of the runway but it never stuck. Sometimes though if I'm in a funk and my landings have been off for a bit I'll start doing it and it usually gets me back on track. Typically I just use my peripheral vision to guide me.

Cheers,
Chax

[Meatservo]

Every now and then my wife gives me a brainy book in the hopes that I will someday become smarter. I'm not becoming smarter, but a couple of books recently have made me think about the way people learn and the way I instruct. One book, I think it was by Malcolm Gladwell or David Eagleman, explained some types of learning and the way we store information.

I don't want to plagiarize or get into trouble from oversimplifying, but basically there are some skills that take a long time to learn, and are best learned through repetition. The upshot is that once the technique has moved into "muscle memory", it becomes very difficult for the individual to tell you exactly what he is doing. I'm not doing a very good job of explaining. For myself, I've noticed that things like landing or docking a floatplane or even a co-ordinated turn, are examples of something a person initially does step-by-step (step one: bank. Step two: increase pitch. Step three: center the ball. Step four: add power. Or something like that). Soon, you don't really think about it anymore. Even complex and highly variable things like unconsciously mapping out a path to open water from a tricky shore before you land, eventually you "just do it" without consulting your memory for the specific steps. Every now and then I have to dock a twin otter from the right seat when the wind is bad or the mechanics need the right wing over the dock, and I soon discovered that it isn't so much my BRAIN that knows how to dock from the left seat, it's my right hand. My left hand is really bad at it, almost as bad as a person who has never done it before.

This line of thought leads me to believe that even though most experienced pilots have a pretty easy time judging their height above the surface in the last few seconds of the flight, most of us would be hard-pressed to explain exactly HOW they are doing it. Their unconscious brains, which are much, much more sensitive, intuitive, and intelligent, but less adaptable than our conscious ones, are doing the calculating while the conscious brain is along for the ride and keeping a lookout for unexpected sources of information. One of the authors I mentioned above described the conscious brain as "a tiny stowaway on a giant transatlantic liner, taking credit for the journey while understanding nothing about the vast machinery making it happen" You could I suppose describe most executives this way too, but I digress.

I think to be a really good instructor, or training captain, or whatever, you might give some thought to this idea and spend some time thinking about how you can break these instinctive activities down into steps in a more meaningful way, and verbalize your reactions to what the aeroplane is doing while someone else is manipulating it, in a way that eases the transition from rote learning to "muscle memory" in the student's mind. I personally don't have a lot of advice along these lines, but I believe that people who are recognised as being great teachers, like the late Capt. Arnie Schraeder, probably instinctively understand this.

To answer Cat Driver's original question, I was taught to focus on the far end of the runway while in the flare. This made my landings at night a lot easier, and I think I do the same thing in glassy water. I believe the reason it is effective is that it makes your mind more receptive to peripheral cues, because it is not focussing on anything specific right in front of the plane. I find that when my eyes are focussed for "infinity" it broadens my awareness of the periphery of my visual field, rather than narrowing it on something specific.

This sounds all metaphysical and fruity, but I'm talking more along the lines of "depth-of-field" like in photography.

Whatever, it's been working OK for me lo these past two years or so.

[iflyforpie]

I use my aim point in comparison to the end of the runway to judge my height. Unless the runway is exceedingly short, the end of any runway approximates the vanishing point of the horizon at less than 50 feet. Your aim point becomes closer to the vanishing point the lower you are. If you watch the two together, they are as good a height indication as anything. At night, you often don't have anything except the runway lights telling you the exact same information.

The further down the runway you can look, the straighter you will keep the aircraft as well. You can tell when people are driving looking only 15 feet in front of them by the way they are all over the road.

Depth perception doesn't work. All you have to do is look at the amount of wing tip damage on airplanes to know that useful depth perception ends at around ten feet.

[trey kule]

Actually, I dont think your explanation was all fruity and metaphysical at all,,you got to the "meat" of the matter, meatsserver...In fact, I think if those teaching landings would understand this process , the result would be better. If you read some of the experienced types here who have been honest...they just say what they do works...must be peripheral vision.....except as Rockie noted, a one eyed pilot had no problem judging height.

I have a personal story that describes the process much the same that I trot out fairly regularly, and which I wont bore everyone here with, but you have gotten to the crux of the matter, and most of all the sage advice is just how to get the info planted in that portion of the brain, not how to actually land.....though one does have to wonder how an autoland system works without any eyes at all....

I have, during my career met some amazing pilots who, having had something explained to them, and one or two practices, can internalize the information perfectly. I think we call them natural pilots..On the other hand, the fly by mubers teaching that is being done today through SOPs, checklist adherance, CRM ,in many cases is really a substitute for the fact that the teaching has not been internalized enough, and the memory is not there when it is needed.

[Cat Driver]

I'm back in the Frazer Valley parked in a mall in Chilliwack for the rest of the day and night.

So back to this judging height discussion.

Most pilots do not think very much about where exactly they look during the landing phase of flight so I thought I would get this going and get people thinking about what exactly they see and where they really do look during a landing.

So I will stay on the last part of the landing....the hold off phase where you are just above the runway and allowing speed and lift to decay prior to touch down.

To make this as simple as possible we will pretend we are flying a light aircraft such as the Cessna 172 and we are established in the hold off portion of the landing and it started at five feet above the runway......( We flared from the approach attitude to the level attitude at around twenty feet...remember that part? )

So our speed over the ground will be about the same as driving a car on the highway.

When you are driving down a highway and staying in the same lane do you look a mile ahead?

[trey kule]

Well, Cat, I was not going to comment on this thread, but I think Meatservo had it pretty much correct. And if you read the posts like Rockie's example of a one eyed pilot , and several others who when asked just said to the effect.." I dunno..I just do it...dont ask me how the laws of aerodynamics work" The real truth, I think, is in there.
What I think you are trying to get across, or need to, is how to implant that process in the brain so it will remain there.
We have to be careful in teaching a skill that we do not misunderstand how the process is really taking place in the person, and explain it incorrectly.
We are constantly trying substitute this learning from doing...dare I say it..."experience" by substituting CRM, slavish adherance to checklists and SOP's and ,of course, good old mentoring....
New pilots without the "don't give a shit" attitude which is all to common with new CPL's, need to get out and pracitce landings and take offs with the idea that they will try to make each one perfect, and pretty soon you will have a pilot who does in fact, make pretty darn good and consistent landings....A good instructor merely provides the initial path and then helps in correcting any glaring faults...The rest to me is just mumbo jumbo
It is a fact, that us old guys think because we do something well, we have some inspirational knowledge to share. And sometimes we are wrong.
Sometimes, we can learn something still......just saying is all.

[Cat Driver]

Depth perception doesn't work. All you have to do is look at the amount of wing tip damage on airplanes to know that useful depth perception ends at around ten feet.

Interesting comment Ifly........

......assuming there is validity in the above statement we have to ask why you made the statement and if there should be more focus on how to judge height below ten feet.

I can only speak for myself and I can assure you I can judge height down to a foot consistantly and with practice and concentration on what you are doing so can any pilot with adverage flying skills.

By the way I am using an Apple Ipad with autocorrect off so if I spell something wrong I may correct it when I get home and have use of my lap top.

[Cat Driver]

Yes Trey k. You are correct and I agree that Meatservo did a splendid job in his post explaining this subject.

If you read my thoughts on this subject you will note that I am discussing how we interpet visual clues when landing.....

It is not my intent to try and re-teach anyone here.....maybe I am out to lunch, but I do believe that getting people to examine something they do by rote and maybe get another slant on it can not do any harm nor can it degrade safety...

....if I am wrong and discussing this will lead to someone wrecking their airplane I sure as hell will quit making any comments on how we fly airplanes.

. E.

[Big Pistons Forever]

I never had any luck telling people where to look and describing what they should be seeing. IMO a demonstration is worth a thousand words, so I set the aircraft up in the landing flare and then add just enough power to keep the aircraft floating along just above the runway. I then demonstrate judging height by gradually moving closer and then farther away from the runway. All the student does is look. A few passes usually does the trick and they have no problem after that. One mistake many instructors make when teaching ab initio is trying to explain things while the student is flying. In the early days of flying the act of gripping the control wheel uses up about 90 % of the brains processing power.

MeatServo

When teaching CPL's to be instructors I emphasize the 4 types of competence.

1) Unconscious Incompetence: You don't know you are doing something wrong

2) Conscious Incompetence: You know you are doing something wrong but do not know how to fix it

3) Conscious Competence: You know what you need to do but you have to specifically think about it

4) Unconscious Competence: You do something that needs to be done but with out even being aware you are doing it.

An example would be adding right rudder in a climb to keep the aircraft coordinated. At the first hour of training students will be at level 1 but after quickly passing through level 2 (by virtue of the early ground briefings) they will stay at level 3 (ie the instructor will have to remind them to put the rudder in but less and less often) until near the end of training they have achieved level 4 and do it automatically.

As an instructor it is very important to know what level of competence the student should be at and teach to that level, neither expecting knowledge or skills that are at an unreasonably high level or not holding students accountable for a level of competence that they should be demonstrating at that particular part of their training.

Very experienced pilots operate at mostly the unconscious competence level and for this reason can sometimes be poor ab initio instructors because they don't understand how a student can't do things that are automatic to them.

[xysn]

Interesting topic. I am a pre XC post solo PPL student so I'm interested to see how the veterans do it.

[iflyforpie]

Depth perception doesn't work. All you have to do is look at the amount of wing tip damage on airplanes to know that useful depth perception ends at around ten feet.

Interesting comment Ifly........

......assuming there is validity in the above statement we have to ask why you made the statement and if there should be more focus on how to judge height below ten feet.

I was talking about binocular depth perception, which I stand by my statement is of little use beyond ten feet. Can you land accurately with one eye closed? I can. It's is because we can use other cues, like peripheral vision, size relation, and relative motion to determine distance and again, the relationship of nearby ground to the vanishing point to determine height above ground.

[Cat Driver]

Looks like I am over thinking this how to fly thing and have forgotten that I might be out of touch with how to instruct pilots, especially at the ab-inito level.

I could spend a ton of money and time to renew my Canadian Flight Instructors rating and become an expert on how to teach......but somehow I just can not get excited about making maybe a hundred dollars a day with that new found skill.

So I am going to go sit in the weeds again and let this thread die a natural death.

. E.

[Beefitarian]

By the way I am using an Apple Ipad with autocorrect off so if I spell something wrong I may correct it when I get home and have use of my lap top.

You should be good if it's off.

[Meatservo]

Big Pistons Forever

Thank you for that post, you put what I was trying to say much more succinctly. I've often tried to coach myself along these lines when trying to figure out why a guy (or gal) just doesn't seem to be understanding what I'm trying to explain to them. Usually when an instructor is frustrated, it's because he's forgetting that things that his brain has relegated to the "unconscious competence" category are actually quite complex and difficult if you haven't done them a thousand times before.

As an interesting aside, some believe the reason this happens is that the computer-like unconscious mind IS actually TEACHING ITSELF the mathematics and relationships involved in pre-calculating the likely effect of one action or another. For instance, when we use our binocular vision to ascertain distance, we are not aware of it, but the unconscious brain is using trigonometry to determine the relative distances between things. It's absolutely correct that depth perception is only accurate close up, because the focal range of the eyeball is what the brain uses to get distance information to make the trigonometry work. Another example is music. In a book called "this is your brain on music", I read that the brain can hear octaves and fifths and thirds, etc, because it is mathematically analyzing the differences in frequency and feeding the resulting relationships to the conscious brain in the form of a perception of a pleasant sound versus a discordant one.

I suspect that in the case of a highly experienced pilot who handles an aeroplane intuitively and gracefully, his brain has actually learned some laws of aerodynamics, that it is using to direct the conscious mind and the body in the form of intuition and "feelings", towards the right course of action.

If only we could communicate with our unconscious minds a little less abstractly, think of what we could learn and figure out...although I suspect that the unconscious mind is a little sociopathic, so maybe it's best left the way it is.

I guess this relates to Cat's original post only in the sense that if you're having trouble judging your landings, KEEP PRACTICING!

[Cat Driver]

Evenin Meatservo.

Just got back to my motor home after a good dinner in a restaurant and see you guys are still on track here and examining how you do things.

Over the decades I tried to improve my teaching methods by figuring out the easiest way to get a student to make an airplane go where they wanted it to go.

A few things that I have learned are...

Never show impatience or frustration with a student.

Always speak clearly and in the same tone of voice no matter how badly they are controlling the airplane.

Make sure they understand the task you are teaching before moving on to the next one.

When teaching landings I camcord the flying and after the flight I replay the parts where they have problems......lets say they have difficulty judging where to flare and they screw it up......just before the screw up I freeze the picture and ask them to use a lazer pointer to show me where they were looking and what they were seeing and thinking at that point in time.

Of course I also use the demonstrate bit first when teaching any new manouver or task....

Oh....I also count down the height, usually from fifty feet to one foot until they get the picture correct in their minds.

With the Aerobat tail dragger I have them do one minute circuit touch and go wheel landings left and right alternating to build " Muscle memory " so they can do it in their sleep.

[Meatservo]

One day, when he realised that the "normal" way wasn't working, my instructor taught me to land by getting me to take off normally, but then right after the plane got airborne, he had me slowly pull off the power until the machine settled back onto its main gear. After a few times he said "this is what it should look like when you are about to touch down. Remember what this looks like." It worked, and I soloed the next day, right on schedule. He was a clever chap.

[old_man]

.,

Ask yourself this, what visual cues to you use to maintain a precises hover height? How do you keep a constant height when hover taxiing? I honestly don't know what I use but I seem to be able to do it.

[CFR]

If you want an example of "unconscious competence" next time you tie your shoes, stop and try and go through each seperate step. A fair number of folks cannot tie their shoes on first attempt when thinking it through.

[Colonel Sanders]

Walking, riding a bicycle, shifting gears with a manual transmission and catching a baseball or football also take a little effort to learn, before we do them automatically.

One very old trick I use, after we taxi out to the runway, is have the student draw a line all the way across the inside of the canopy or windshield with a dry erase marker, where the horizon is. That's the picture he wants to see during the landing. I have had very good results with that trick, teaching tailwheel, because that's the three point attitude that I want them to establish at one foot above the ground.

[complexintentions]

Interesting thread. I think meatservo absolutely nailed it so I won't beat it to death, just add my own methodology.

I find that where I'm looking changes several consistent times on the approach. On final, I'm looking longer, comparing the entire runway and using peripheral cues to see if the picture "makes sense" to my memory of many previous landings. At the same time cross-checking whatever navaid we're using. At about 500 feet, maybe a little lower if the conditions are diverting more attention inside to the handling, I am concentrating more on the "aim point", where I want to plant the gear, right on the 1000' marks. But at the "One Hundred" radalt call, I shift my look much further down the runway first, not to actually look at the far end of the runway but to allow my vision to be "wider" and utilize my periphery to judge descent rate. At "Thirty", I start the flare and continue to use the peripheral cues to judge the angle, and then am lastly looking fairly close in front of the aircraft, I think this was what Cat was referring to, instinctively looking for the point where apparent motion stops? If I'm feeling particularly confident, I may even then do a slight check forward on the controls to "roll" the mains on as smooth as possible. (At this point there isn't much lift so pulling back further will just drive them on harder.)

But yeah, it's easier to do at this point, than describe. I did find that earlier in my career, that fixating solely on the aim point, within shifting your focus to something wider, tends to lead to harder landings as people tend to instinctively "fly to where they look", and my landings improved by looking "wider". If that makes sense.

[Liquid Charlie]

Good thread for sure -- now a little different slant -- lol -- no pun intended -- all the above will work great for an airplane you can see over the nose in the flair or indeed for the last 10 feet -- I spent several years in that world and it certainly did change the way you see the world - I actually look left of centre in the flair and at a point about 4 to 5 hundred feet - and yes it's the over all feeling of melting into ground level based on peripheral vision

The illusions created by runway length and especially width -- I'm not sure exactly how someone could look at the end of a runway - seems a little far to me and all you would be going is getting a fixed stare and in actual fact it's the ground as seen in your peripheral that is actually doing the job - where do you judge at 1200 rvr (centre line lighting makes a big difference) so even at minimums in IMC where are you getting your clues from? -

Ask a guy how he landed in blowing snow - I have actually looked down and out the side looking for lights - landing beside a shore line or island on glassy water -- - it's a sum total of all the clues -- but getting back to the question -- how do you teach this stuff -- I don't think you can - you can point out the various aspects and it's up to the individual to put them together and adjust to their own technique --

This issues goes hand in hand with the concerns of the loss of stick and rudder skills due to automation -

[Cat Driver]

As more pilots read this discussion there are more and more comments and ideas being shared.

The truth is few pilots ever analyze how they process visual information during the landing......and especialy just before touch down.

Part of the reason is it is a phase of flight when things happen in a quick succession of movements and quick visual picture changes.

There is no one size fits all in this discussion as not only do different people process information differently it changes with the type of device we are driving at the moment.

For instance back when the Bell 47 was the trainer of choice we loked out through a bubble so there was no " nose " for a referance point.

Also all the water scoper pilots can not possibly be looking a mile ahead during the water pickup because there would be a lot more instances of hitting debris in the water.

I'm getting real old and soon what little memory I have left will fade and I won't be able to remember how to use this computer so I am bringing up these interesting discussions now.

As long as my vision and reflexes remain good I plan on keeping on flying......checking my reflexes is fun and as long as I can gain a stroke changing hands everything is A.O.K.

[Liquid Charlie]

Here we go Cat -- this should help us -- -- makes you squint so should help focus in the flare -

[Cat Driver]

That looks a lot like a device they had at the riding academy for catching those drips we used to get.