Post by Tom Goodrick on Sept 8, 2009 19:39:51 GMT -5
I happened to take a good look at a spreadsheet i pull out and minimize every time I fly. It is a log of all landings. I normally just see four rows of data and enter the latest data each time I land. But when I looked at the whole thing I found I had 682 rows of data going back to August 31, 2007 - almost exactly two years ago. So it seemed a good time to do what the log was intended to help with - study some landing data.
I have had a fascination with landing since I watched my dad land his Aeronca Champ as an 8-year-old kid. I never watched my own landings 25 years later when I took lessons. No one videod my landings. Later I watched my two sons make their early landings - a rather painful experience as you feel the wallet in your back pocket that might have to be emptied (and then some) to pay for repairs. Buat the landing remains a fascinating part of flying because you somehow go from flying high and relatively fast to rolling very slow on the ground and parking. At some point in that interval, you have landed. Hopefully you can walk away. Most of us always seem to walk away though we may have either a prideful smirk on our face our a brisk walk sheepishly looking at the ground in front of our feet as we head for the office.
In old versions of FS (was it fs2000?), we could trap the touch down speeds - airspeed and vertical rate when the wheels touched. But the idiots who have take over the Flight Simulator in recent years threw that part away. That was probably because they did so poorly at it.
So for FS2004, in about 2006 or 2007 I devised the Landing Speed Gauge which you can download from my web site for free. It took a bit of work to get the bugs out - so it would get the main landing of several if you bounced and would not forget data before you were ready to read it (that can still happen if you are not carefull). But it has now been used by many people in many aircraft in many operating conditions. It won't do water landings but it works fine on dry runways using wheels.
I had a bit of work to do today fixing the spreadsheet so I could get averages of both the airspeed and the vertical rate for each type of plane. My log is ordered by time. Also I am lazy and did not want to fill cells repeating the same info. So I left blanks below repeated items like dates, aircraft names and airports. It made sense at the time I started doing it. But to sort by aircraft you must have all name cells filled. And then when you pull out and re-order the rows, blanks are not helpful. So I spent today going through and filling all the blanks. If you want to do this, be kind to yourself and fill all cells before saving a day's data. Then to get averages it is a simple mater of copying the data, sorting by aircraft name name and then getting averages from data in consecutive rows.
The funny thing was I didn't end up with large numbers of data sets for any one airplane. Many have only 6 or 8. One had 29 and another had 17. So if you like only one or two aircraft a lot, just go out and get 12 to 15 landings with each one you like. You can compare your data with mine.
Here's the result of my effort:
AIRCRAFT____________KIAS______FPM
Cessna 172R___________52.7_______-224
Cessna 182S___________65.2_______-203
Beech V35B____________78.1_______-244
Beech Baron 58 & 58P____86.5_______-143
Beech 350_____________91.8_______-214
DC-3_________________80.1_______-148
Falcon 900B___________97.7________-182
Hawker 400____________113.8______-148
Learjet 45______________119.2______-87
Piper Meridian___________75.7_______-118
Here is the list of data columns I jot down:
Date Aircraft APT KIAS FPM WEIGHT CG% REMARKS
I have had a fascination with landing since I watched my dad land his Aeronca Champ as an 8-year-old kid. I never watched my own landings 25 years later when I took lessons. No one videod my landings. Later I watched my two sons make their early landings - a rather painful experience as you feel the wallet in your back pocket that might have to be emptied (and then some) to pay for repairs. Buat the landing remains a fascinating part of flying because you somehow go from flying high and relatively fast to rolling very slow on the ground and parking. At some point in that interval, you have landed. Hopefully you can walk away. Most of us always seem to walk away though we may have either a prideful smirk on our face our a brisk walk sheepishly looking at the ground in front of our feet as we head for the office.
In old versions of FS (was it fs2000?), we could trap the touch down speeds - airspeed and vertical rate when the wheels touched. But the idiots who have take over the Flight Simulator in recent years threw that part away. That was probably because they did so poorly at it.
So for FS2004, in about 2006 or 2007 I devised the Landing Speed Gauge which you can download from my web site for free. It took a bit of work to get the bugs out - so it would get the main landing of several if you bounced and would not forget data before you were ready to read it (that can still happen if you are not carefull). But it has now been used by many people in many aircraft in many operating conditions. It won't do water landings but it works fine on dry runways using wheels.
I had a bit of work to do today fixing the spreadsheet so I could get averages of both the airspeed and the vertical rate for each type of plane. My log is ordered by time. Also I am lazy and did not want to fill cells repeating the same info. So I left blanks below repeated items like dates, aircraft names and airports. It made sense at the time I started doing it. But to sort by aircraft you must have all name cells filled. And then when you pull out and re-order the rows, blanks are not helpful. So I spent today going through and filling all the blanks. If you want to do this, be kind to yourself and fill all cells before saving a day's data. Then to get averages it is a simple mater of copying the data, sorting by aircraft name name and then getting averages from data in consecutive rows.
The funny thing was I didn't end up with large numbers of data sets for any one airplane. Many have only 6 or 8. One had 29 and another had 17. So if you like only one or two aircraft a lot, just go out and get 12 to 15 landings with each one you like. You can compare your data with mine.
Here's the result of my effort:
AIRCRAFT____________KIAS______FPM
Cessna 172R___________52.7_______-224
Cessna 182S___________65.2_______-203
Beech V35B____________78.1_______-244
Beech Baron 58 & 58P____86.5_______-143
Beech 350_____________91.8_______-214
DC-3_________________80.1_______-148
Falcon 900B___________97.7________-182
Hawker 400____________113.8______-148
Learjet 45______________119.2______-87
Piper Meridian___________75.7_______-118
Here is the list of data columns I jot down:
Date Aircraft APT KIAS FPM WEIGHT CG% REMARKS