Jacko wrote:
That pilot’s “glassy water” technique is one of my favorites: pick a spot on the lake which is not actually “glassy”. Even on a flat calm day, one can often find a small patch of ripple like that.
Indeed, having a ripple to land into is great, but altering your landing to achieve that can be troublesome. The main objective is a stable descent to a glassy water landing, so altering that at the last minute is asking for trouble, and if you miss the ripples, and get back over the glass again before you touch down, having abandoned the glassy water stable approach, your only safe option is an instant go around. This is similar to a skis landing on unbroken snow – same lack of visual cues. When I flew that landing, I was looking forward to the benefit of the ripples if they happened under my touchdown area, but as you can see, I did not alter my approach profile at all, all the way down. To be truthful, I was not sure I was on the water until I rolled the ailerons a touch, and the plane did not respond!
Jacko wrote:
but if we were all so shy of inflicting one third of the design load factor on our airplanes, we would never do aerobatics, and we would never extend flap in a Maule:
A difference though is that flight loads are [hopefully] built up more slowly, and are not hammering the plane. More to my concern is that it is difficult to hit the ground that hard without inducing a pitch change, which then demands some skill to control. Flight loads are generally built up in “commanded” flight, so control is being maintained the whole time. Flying such that a bounce at night is more likely introduces greater risk of loss of control. I resist the notion that an “arrival” in a GA aircraft should be a normal technique to avoid applying the skill for a normally flared, gentle landing. Sure, we all hit a little hard from time to time, but for me, doing so is never the intention
That would be nice. Kirkbride is slightly nearer than CK as the crow flies, with free landing if you uplift some of their (reasonably-priced) AVGAS.
Next time I land at Castle Kennedy (or threreabouts) I will give you a shout…
05:00 is Loch Trool, about 10 Maule-minutes west of here. The others are Doon (a WW1 seaplane base and aerial gunnery school, complete with access roads illegally? built by POWs), Dee and Clatteringshaws. We only have three or four dozen landable lochs in our god-forsaken miserable wet corner of this third-world kingdom, but we mustn’t grumble… 
Great, Jacko! That loch at 05:00 is beautiful. Where exactly is that?
Pilot_DAR wrote:
3.3 FPS would be from nearly half, to one third of the design tolerance for a landing load for certification. I’d rather not plan to do that to a plane in normal operation, when I can instead apply skill to prevent that hit.
OK, each to his own, but if we were all so shy of inflicting one third of the design load factor on our airplanes, we would never do aerobatics, and we would never extend flap in a Maule:
…or in a Cessna 180:
Topic drift again – Peter, thanks for posting that video. That pilot’s “glassy water” technique is one of my favorites: pick a spot on the lake which is not actually “glassy”. Even on a flat calm day, one can often find a small patch of ripple like that. Here are some more examples of such “cheating” (from about minutes 3:50), but there is one proper glassy touch & go at minutes 6:40 when the only way to tell that she’s on the water is to see the tyre get wet in the bottom left corner of the video:
I have found a convoluted way to download it, with a plug-in in Chrome called FBdown.
It is here
If there is a problem with this location, please let me know and I will take it down (I will be out this afternoon) but it appears the intention was indeed to make it public.
Even with a FB account I cannot see it…
I can see it presumably because I have a FB account but really we would have to download it (I am sure there is a way; from youtube it’s trivial) and then with permission from the owner, host it here.
Pilot_DAR wrote:
Let me see if I can paste a video from Facebook here (Peter?)https://www.facebook.com/100002267744238/videos/856143381137912/
The video is not publicly available.
