Warbird Information Exchange

Moving dirt:



Photo by S. Kovalsky on Sunday, 7/31/11

When do the heavy dudes start commenting on how far off centerline he was?

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I was just going to say that he laid down a straighter set of furrows than your average Ultra Glide rider could on his Milwaukee middle buster

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Don't make me go get my flying monkeys-

Easy, Randy!

Ken

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"Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves."

Just poking fun at the somewhat funny differences in what different flying communities find important.

It's something that's been quite apparent while flying the King Air with guys who normally fly airplanes with big wingspans: they pay a HUGE amount of attention to how close to on centerline you land, and consider it some sort of pride thing as to how close to the center you can put the nosewheel.

That's something that I can honestly say that in a decade of flying fighters and trainers, I've never cared about (unless it was to debrief a student or wingman that he landed too close to the centerline and not staggered enough!).

Not that any of that is a problem -- if your airplane has a huge wingspan, it makes sense that is something you'd care about. If you have a much narrower airplane, then it matters a whole lot less. And, despite what some pilots have told me, it's not a reflection on your skill and professionalism as an aviator if you don't land perfectly on the center. In fact, some of us in smaller airplanes intentionally don't land on the centerline, either for a staggered formation landing or to offset from centerline lighting so our hook doesn't skip if we have brake failure.

But for some pilots it's become something of their measure of a good landing, even if not operationally necessary. I can't tell you how many times in training or MQT for the King Air the instructor (usually a KC or RC-135 dude) would say, "nice landing, but you were about a foot and a half left of centerline."

Oh, I'm sorry...did we acquire a 100-foot wingspan at sometime during the flight that I'm not aware of, or are we still a King Air, and the runway is still 3-times wider than our aircraft?

So, I was just humorously noting that someone with the myopic view of centerline landings would look at that photo and note that he was off to the left. Not considering, though, that this aircraft was #2 in a formation and was intentionally staggered off to the left to begin with....

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