Hard Lessons

War stories are like jokes in the sense that if you tell one, it makes you think of another. The reason I wrote this one is because it follows the story about getting to my sister’s wedding in a T-37. Having said that, the second part of the story is only related to the first because it also happened on the same trip to my sister’s wedding. But telling that story leads to two more, all of which I include here under the title “Hard Lessons”.
There was a limit to how far the Air Force would allow us to fly their jets on the weekends. I went as far as I could in the Air Force jet, and was still over 100 miles from the wedding site. I stayed in touch with the family throughout the trip and, even though I could have finished the trip in a rental car, my father had arranged for a friend of a friend to pick me up in his Cessna 172 for the rest of the journey.
Meeting up went as planned. The very congenial aircraft owner was emitting enthusiasm about the whole prospect of transporting me. I took this cue and others to conclude that he had a relatively new private pilot license. His wife was with him and they had obviously found flying together to be a
bonding endeavor. They were proud of their airplane and eager to use it for practical purposes. He displayed some misplaced awe in my flying experience, practically bowing to me, and I humbly ate itup.

By now I had made it through USAF pilot training and had flown T-37s, T-38s, and KC-135s, all pretty capable jets. Most recently the Air Force had assigned me to instruct its next generation of pilots. His mistake was assuming that all my military experience translated to proficiency in a Cessna
172. We took off and pointed the airplane in the direction of the wedding. He seemed to figure that I would find flying a propeller driven single engine airplane to be a piece of cake compared to what I flew every day. I honestly don’t remember who did the takeoff, I think he did, but eventually I was
at the controls. Since most airplanes are pretty easy to fly straight and level, maneuvering it in cruise was a piece of cake. When it came time to land, I asked him if he wanted to take the controls and fly, but he wanted to let me do it. I had flown similar airplanes before, but that dated back almost 10 years and some of the specifics had escaped my brain. I remembered we used to come down final at 60, or was it 70 MPH? Or was it knots? I was maintaining something in that range, but real uncertain how close to the correct speed I was. So I asked him the direct question: “What airspeed should I be flying?” His answer was not so direct, saying “you’re doing fine”. He meant well
and I appreciated the confidence he had in me, but that answer was simply not responsive to my question. If he knew what I was about to do with his airplane, he might have mustered up a little more detail.
Most final approach speeds are around 1.2 times the speed of an aerodynamic stall. That 20% cushion prevents falling out of the sky from small gusts and other deviations. The airplane will fly slower, but it would have to be maneuvered more precisely because the safety margin would be less and, more to the point, the wings behave differently as they near a stall and require a bit different technique.
So, which was it? Was he worried about embarrassing me for being a little slow, or was I just right, or a little fast? I asked him again, I even tried to phrase it a little differently…”Yeah, but what airspeed is normal for final?” and again he answered “you’re doing fine”. How many different ways could I ask this question? I was a bit frustrated, but turned my attention to short final and
touchdown.
As I have already alluded, there are things that happen when you are a little slow. Lift from the wings no longer follows the normal rules. While most of the time more angle of attack means more lift, that relationship is less and less true as you approach stall speed. That means sometimes when
you are slow you can pull on the stick, asking for more lift, and the airplane replies with something like, “Sir, your request is denied”.
As I closed in on the runway that day, I raised the nose as usual to break the descent, and the airplane just laughed at me and said “I don’t care who you think you are, breaking the descent ain’t in the plan, as for breaking something else, maybe.”. The next thing was KA-WHAM! That Cessna
spring gear was sprung to new depths, and it answered the insult by throwing us right back into the sky we had come from, but this time with even less airspeed. My companion went from star-struck to what-was-struck in a nanosecond and by now we were both gripping our respective yokes and
swishing them around like a bad pair of synchronized swimmers trying to find what little control they had to offer with our slow airspeed. I came in with the throttle ready to do a full go-around, but had enough runway left to stabilize things and get it down for good.
As we taxied in I apologized, but politely reminded him that I had been asking him about the airspeed on final. If any airplane was built for hard landings, it would the Cessna 172, and I think we both suspected everything was ok with it. By the next day he must have been fully satisfied about that because he flew me back to our starting point; but emphasis is on, he flew me. There was no offer to let me touch the controls the entire trip, and his wife stayed home.

Part 2.
Hard landings happen in the in the airlines too. One hallmark of a bad landing is a dropped oxygen mask. They say there are two kinds of airline pilots when it comes to dropping an oxygen mask after a hard landing, those that have and those that will. I will tell you about one I had in in a 757 that
dropped a whole panel. I made an assertion earlier, using fairly basic airplane jargon, that approach speed is generally about 1.2 times your “stall speed”. There are two other terms that might seem very similar to a novice, “pitch” and “angle of attack”. They are different in a very important way, but most of the time they are almost the same thing. The limiting factor for landing a 757 was pitch because airplane geometry made a tail-strike during landing a real possibility if you got too slow. Slower means higher pitch to achieve the same lift. On this occasion I was observing my copilot who had flown years as a C-141 aircraft commander and had been right on top of everything for the whole
flight, except for the last 100 feet. He was new to the 757, and even though this was my second leg with him, it was his first landing of the trip. The weather was good and I thought the flight was all over except the applause, then, in the last 100 feet, he got slow. I said something very clear and exact because there would be no time to repeat it. Something like “watch your speed, you are slow”. He was fixating on something else and not reacting to my comment. After waiting as much time as I dared, I intervened. By 50 feet he was probably 10 knots low and there was great risk that he would hit the
tail, causing damage. The only thing we could do at that point to remain safe and undamaged was lower the nose and accept a hard landing. I knew the airplane could take it. There was no time left to talk him through that, so instead I nudged forward on the yoke. One good whoosh of power
might have saved us from a firm touchdown, even at that point, but when I went to shove the throttles forward, my hand only caught the left one. I guess I stopped myself from pushing just one throttle too far forward because adding asymmetric thrust to the mix was the last thing I needed. So, there it was again, KA-WHAM!
Big airplanes have wing spoilers that automatically extend when the aircraft senses weight on wheels or wheel spin up. This helps to keep the airplane on the ground, so part 2 of this war story does not include a bounce. The main dilemma at this point was what to say to the passengers. I
knew the hard landing was like an elephant in the room; I had to say something! I make it my policy to be make honest announcements, but keeping in mind that there is no need to be too honest. I got on the public address when I got a chance and announced my apology to the passengers. Do I tell them the truth? I quickly ruled out this one: “Folks I am sorry for that hard landing, sometimes you have to choose between a hard landing and damaging the airplane.” Neither choice instills much confidence in AA pilots. This was a bit before the days of social networks instantly uploading your
every move, but still I had to be careful about what I said. The truth was the FO was not looking at his airspeed, I couldn’t say that, even though at some point we all drop it out of our crosscheck in favor of a proper picture out the window. I let him go as far as I could and accepted a hard landing in favor of something worse. I am afraid my announcement lacked its normal eloquence, but I made sure not to give my passengers a sound bite to abuse. I mumbled something nondescript to avoid ignoring the elephant in the room.
I did not write it up as a hard landing, not because I wanted to cover it up, rather because I did not believe it qualified as a hard landing because of guidelines in the book that suggest the definition of hard landing in terms descent rate at touchdown. The copilot and I agreed that it was not technically a hard landing. In hindsight I should have written it up; the inspection after a hard landing is a no-lose proposition and the most conservative approach would have been to write it up. I never heard another thing about it.

Part 3: So, at what point is a hard landing technically a hard landing? I guess somewhere between that story and this next one. I was a 727 copilot, pre-flighting in the cockpit at a LaGuardia gate in the early 1990s. Our captain was standing in the cockpit doorway having a cup of coffee before passenger boarding began. I was setting bugs, pulling up the weather, greasing the chute for our clearance, etc. To be more specific about how I was pulling up the weather, it was by listening to the ATIS frequency on the two-way radio. While listening, I noticed a fire truck driving by with emergency lights on, but got the sense that it was some kind of training exercise. Next, I saw a Delta L-1011, a widebody 3 engine jet, on short final approach wallowing at a high pitch attitude.
Earlier when I referenced the relationship between pitch attitude (angle of attack) and lift, I said the wings behave differently when near a stall, and after enough years looking at this stuff your eyes can pick it up even from beyond the cockpit. An airplane in this high angle of attack will appear to be plowing through the air; and the best word I can use to describe it is wallowing. I exclaimed something like “whoa!” in enough time to get the captain to witness what was about to happen as well.
In my mind’s eye, it was the copilot flying the airplane and the Captain was too late to intervene. When the pilot flying increased the pitch to slow the descent rate, the request was denied, much as it was for me in the earlier Cessna 172 story, and the result was KA-WHAM!
As I watched the oleo struts on the main gear compress fully and contemplate throwing the big jet right back into the air, it looked like the captain intervened by pushing aggressively on the stick. While this kept the airplane on the ground, the nose gear came crashing down so hard that its two tires each separated from the airplane and went careening, surely at more than 130 MPH, towards the grass on their respective sides of the runway.

Now there was nothing but a stub throwing sparks as the airplane continued down the runway. Knowing how fast a situation can degenerate to absolute danger, and that the fire trucks were already mobilized, and that I might be the only person seeing this who actually had a radio, I squeezed the microphone and said “Fire on Delta, Fire on Delta!”. I thought any second saved getting the message to the fire trucks could be a matter of life and death, but, in my haste, I was too stupid to switch to a meaningful frequency and I announced it on ATIS frequency, which only other pre-flighting airplanes were likely to be monitoring. By the time I realized that mistake, the airplane had come to a stop on the runway with a ground-down stub and no apparent fire.
As it happened, it came to rest smack in the middle of the intersection of LaGuardia’s only two runways. This left the airport closed for the rest of the day. Airlines had to divert inbounds and cancel all outbound flights, including mine. Soon I was taxiing, and by that I mean riding in a taxi, to New
York’s other airport, JFK, to dead-head home. It was probably the next day when I got through to Delta’s pilot union to offer my witness in defense of the pilots. It is hard to communicate why I did this, but I was worried for their careers, and maybe a member of the pilot brotherhood could help them out. There is no regulation that automatically grounds a pilot after such an incident and it’s an ironic nuance that getting back in the air can be an important step to a pilot because it suggests de-facto approval from anybody who did not object in time. This fuzzy axiom is certainly not written anywhere, but I won’t steal credit for the notion. I didn’t know exactly what I could say on their behalf, and was surprised and happy to learn that they were already back in the air. I learned from the union that the pilots had called them from the runway, one of the first things they did after coming to a stop, to give them a
heads-up that they might need some representation. Nowadays we all carry cell-phones, but at the time, airlines had the “Airphone”, which was like a pay phone that would take credit cards. The pilots would have had to leave the cockpit, grab the phone, swipe their card and then carry the hand-set back into the cockpit for the conversation.
My brother happened to be the lead mechanic in the Delta landing gear shop in Atlanta. He called me a few weeks later while he was looking right at the broken nose gear. He said the axle had snapped on each side and what remained in the middle had been scraped flat halfway through. That is pretty
much what I saw from 2000 feet away. I don’t know if they were able to salvage any portion of the gear. They probably tested everything above the compression strut for cracks using the various tools of the trade, magnaflux, dye-penetrant, and xray. On the other hand, all the majestic L1011s were
aging and close to retirement; it might have been smart to simply scrap what was left of that nose gear.