How long until you were decent at landings
 

Hey guys,

I am working on my PPL. I am at about 11 hours of flight time right now. We have gone over:

Climbs, descents, straight and level, stalls, slow flight, turns around a point, s turns, steep turns. I am decent on the radio. My first progress check is being scheduled.

We have only done a couple touch and go’s so I do not have much practice on landings. I am getting better but still have a lot to go.

My question is:
How many hours did it take for you to have decent/feel confident on landings?

In your PPL training, what part of flying or a particular maneuver did you find the most difficult/struggle with the most?

Going on four decades. Still working on it.

My last one wasn't so hot.

Struggled most with.......landings.

It’s funny you should post this. I’m in my flight training for my PPL too and was just thinking about how much work my landings still need. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one. Everything I’ve read (and anyone I’ve talked to on this issue) says it’ll “click” sooner than later but will always be something to continually work on.

Good luck in your training OP.

Yesterday I had my best landing to date (still was not great...). There was not much crosswind so it was a bit easier.

I guess like most things, you need to practice and practice. In the very limited time I have been training, I've already become much more comfortable with flying in general but have a long way to go. Like others have mentioned on here, even with many years and thousands of hours you are always learning and striving to improve.

However, when I read stories on here that some people have solo'ed around 7-8 hours blows my mind. There is no way I would want to solo right now. I may be able to manage a take off, fly pattern, and land without killing myself but anything out of the ordinary were to happen... yikes.

It took me forever to master using the rudder. Like I was around 30 hours or so before it finally "clicked" for me... I wasn't used to thinking 3-dimensionally

It'll come, if everything else is going OK. Exactly how long it takes depends on the individual.

Struggled a lot with it in private, instrument, commercial. It was only when I got to instructor that I actually had an instructor that really understood how to teach it and take it apart. Then I decided to make my weakness my strength, giving as may references as possible to students to account for varying conditions and situations. Most airplanes seem to land about the same to me now. Key is getting to the correct energy state at the correct height, then when you increase the pitch, it doesn't make you balloon, it makes you arrest the descent rate and land on the mains. The timing and exact heights/points differ between aircraft, but the concept is the same. Lots of non-descriptive "reduce the power when it 'looks good'" and "look down the runway" and having no idea of the approach path did not help.

A true Sky God can intuitively solve the four dimensional equation in his/her head and zero out their rate of descent at the very instant their wheels touch in perfect alignment with the runway astraddle the centerline from an incredibly diverse universe of possible approaches, including turns, as well as steep and shallow descents.

For most of us, a good landing is the result of a good stabilized approach. That won’t of course GUARANTEE you a good landing, any more than an unstable approach guarantees a crash, but it sure makes the odds better.

I think too many instructors go straight for this, without even understanding it themselves, and without thousands of hours to back it up, the results are usually random and not attributable to any procedure. That's what ends up hurting students trying to learn this IMO. For those that don't have this, which is most of us, we need cues on how high to be level above the runway, when to reduce the power, how fast to reduce power, how much to compensate for wind (quantitatively) and then we can start to build up how to correct for being slightly outside of that perfect window, but still well within safe landings.