38 58 10.92 N,75 52 0.00 W,Highland Aerosports, Ridgely,
Maryland, USA

This seventh in a series of articles is taken from here: http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26379

Jim Rooney <<jim>> writes:

I nearly forgot a very important one.

This goes ahead of everything else, but is very often overlooked for many
reasons. Landing on the wheels, on purpose.

The significance of this didn't dawn on me till I started spending a lot of time
doing tandems and very little time flying solo. It's not till you start doing
"production tandems" that this idea enters your world. I was working as a
commercial tandem pilot at a place where we land the tandems on wheels and being
a foreigner, I didn't have a solo glider readily available. Every now and then,
I'd hop on a tandem and fly it solo, but most of the time I just flew my
paraglider. Well, this makes for a very interesting situation. You're
exceptionally current at flying, but horribly uncurrent at foot landing. Not a
mix you find often. So when you do wind up finally getting back on a solo
glider, there is quite the nagging thought in the back of your head. "how rusty
have I become?".

And here's the strange strange answer, not much at all.

The reason why is the interesting bit.

All those wheel landings actually help, a lot.

See, with the wheel landings, we're doing all the landing bits except final
flare, and we're actually doing a bit of that as well.

You're diving at the earth (faster than trim) and flying the glider way down
into ground effect, then you're maintaining height, often for as long as
possible because passengers (and you) love it. It's fun as hell. Up hill, down
hill, into wind, with the wind, cross wind, who cares? You're on wheels. Over
and over and over.

You get very very very in tune with your glider.

Because you're landing on your belly (and the passenger's belly) all blessed day
long, you instinctively become gentle about it as well.

So, you skim the earth for a very long time, then you give a bit of a shove at
the end and more plop down rather than just skidding in. Sometimes you do skid
in and sometimes you smash it onto the wheels a little early, but it's the plop
ones that are important in regards to foot landings. Cuz, yup, they correlate
directly to the flare. You're just pushing out on the base bar instead of
slamming the uprights up.

It's not exactly the same of course. As they say, there's nothing like the real
thing. But damn if it doesn't help more than you'd expect. I know it shocked me.

You're also managing all the "other" parts of landing without a cluttered mind
that's worrying about sorting the flare.

So then when you switch back to doing the flare bit, you're not bothered about
the other bits because they're automatic by this point.

We do this all the time with students that we teach via aerotowing. They get
loads of practice at all the other bits of landing before they get anywhere near
flaring. Only after they've got everything else down, do we progress them. And
it makes for a very easy transition.