Hello and hope all of you are well.
Coming straight to the point, I fly in the solo mode and have practiced to accomplish great landings in almost all aircrafts except for the A320 family. I don’t know what’s the problem. The aircraft tends to excessively float and refuses to touch down until the speed is down to at least 100 knots.
I’d be grateful if you experienced pilots and help me out in understanding what’s happening here. I am clearly missing something.
Thank you very much and I look forward to your responses.
I think you are going to fast. You want to land right around 100-110 kts with flaps on full. Might also have to do with the ground effect. I’ve noticed it with the A320 as well.
Well, depending on the winds… 100 kts will stall you out. You should be at 140-160kts when you start your final decent. You should be below 200kts when landing the A320.
Thanks guys. I already see a couple of responses. Hurray!
Anyway, is there a way around this so called ground effects? I seem to be doing everything fine in terms of speed, full flaps, a stable approach, no sudden jerky inputs. Still the aircraft doesn’t want to touch down. By the time it does touch down, the whole thing looks extremely unrealistic as you can imagine. So, any solutions to this? Thank you again for your time and help. Greatly appreciated.
You could land with Flaps 3 as pilots do it sometimes in RL. Also, don’t pitch up your nose too much. I usually land the A320 at around 137kts-142kts. But I think Flaps 3 should help here.
What do you mean by this… if your at a steady decent rate and alligned with the LOC, you should be able to touch down… pilots would cut the throttle 10-20 ft off the runway to smoothly glide in (if you mean not landing and floating above the runway for 3 - 4 seconds)
Gravity will eventually win but you have to learn to manage your angle of attack. Depending on the wind conditions and weight of the aircraft you may have to fine tune your landing speed just keeping yourself above stall speed. Have you seen our communities flight tutorials?
What I meant by my comment was that the aircraft just seems to float for a long time before touching down. This is despite the fact that my flaps, speed and rate of descent all are seemingly correct. Quite confused by this, haha!
That’s where the problem lies. By the time I am about 75 feet or so over the runway, my speed is 130 knots like you suggested. However the aircraft wheels don’t seem to touch the runway till the speed has come down to a 100 knots. That’s what I meant to say. Sorry if I wasn’t clear on this before.
Flaring at about the 50 feet call out. Can you recommend a good landing trim setting for the A320? I always tend to change mine from one flight to another depending on how the aircraft ‘feels’.