Flare Timing: Mastering the Last Fifty Feet

This series has spent months arguing that landings are decided early - by approach speed, by stability, by planning that starts forty miles out. All true. And yet: fly two identical, stable, on-speed approaches, and one still ends in a squeaker while the other ends in a thump, and the difference lives entirely in the last fifty feet. Having spent the series earning the right to talk about the flare, let's finally talk about the flare.

What the flare actually is

Strip the mystique: the flare is an energy conversion. You arrive over the threshold descending at 600-700 fpm, and the wheels want to meet the runway at under 200. The flare - a progressive pitch-up beginning a couple of dozen feet above the surface - trades airspeed for a shallower descent, letting drag eat the remaining energy while the aircraft settles the last few feet at a fraction of its approach rate. Done right, the wing stops flying just as the wheels arrive.

Two phases hide inside it, and separating them mentally fixes half of most pilots' problems. The roundout is the first, larger correction: arresting most of the descent rate, from perhaps 20 feet, pitching from the approach attitude toward level. The hold-off is the second: nearly level over the runway, power at idle, easing the nose progressively up as speed decays, keeping the aircraft flying just above the surface until it can't. The touchdown is not something you do; it is something the hold-off runs out of. Pilots who "flare and land" in one motion skip the hold-off entirely - and arrive flat, fast and firm.

Where to look (this is most of it)

Ask an instructor what fixes flares and the answer is boringly consistent: eyes. Through final you have been looking at the aiming point - but keep staring at it into the flare and it disappears under the nose while the ground rushes at your face, robbing you of both height and rate cues. The fix: as the roundout begins, shift your gaze to the far end of the runway. The long view gives your brain what it needs - height above the surface from peripheral cues, drift the instant it starts, pitch attitude against the horizon. Sim pilots on flat screens lack the depth perception of VR or reality, which makes the long view more important at a desk, not less: texture flow and runway-edge convergence are your altimeter down there.

When to begin? The classic light-aircraft cue is at about the height of a house roof - 15 to 20 feet - or, usably: when the runway sides start visibly spreading in your peripheral vision. Jets do the measuring for you: the radio altimeter counts down and something A320-sized wants the flare begun around "thirty". Either way the input is progressive - the flare is a rate you feed in, not a position you pull to.

Different aircraft, different flares

The judgement transfers between aircraft; the numbers do not. A C172 flares low and gently, holds off long, and rewards patience - full-stall touchdowns, stick coming steadily back, are the ideal. A heavier piston or turboprop (the M600 crowd, say) carries more inertia: the roundout starts slightly higher and the hold-off is shorter - hold off airliner-long and the sink builds through the float. An A320 barely flares at all by GA standards: a few degrees of pitch from thirty feet, thrust to idle, and fly it on - and its fly-by-wire flare law changes the control feel in the last hundred feet by design, one reason Airbus landings feel different from everything else. And a taildragger gives you two different flares for two different landings: the full-stall three-pointer, and the wheel landing that touches down early, tail-up, flying. Each new type deserves a session of dedicated circuits just to learn where its flare lives.

The three classic failures - and their fingerprints

Flaring high. The roundout completes ten feet up; the aircraft levels, bleeds speed, quits flying, and drops the rest vertically. Firm-to-hard arrival, short of the usual touchdown point, often flat. Cause: eyes on the tarmac ahead of the nose, misreading height. Cure: the long view, and roundout later than instinct says.

Flaring late (or not really). The approach descent rate survives to the surface. The fingerprint is unmistakable in the data: touchdown VSI barely different from final-approach VSI. Often a symptom of a fast approach - the pilot has learned that flaring on-time at VRef+10 means floating forever, and has trained themselves out of the hold-off. Fix the speed and the flare comes back.

The balloon. Too much input, too fast - the aircraft climbs away from the runway with decaying airspeed. The recovery is a miniature test of character: freeze the pitch, let it settle, re-flare gently if the balloon was small - and if it was big, go around, because salvaging a large balloon from five knots above the stall is how very hard landings happen.

Every one of these leaves its signature in a recorded landing: the high flare's short-and-firm arrival, the late flare's approach-rate touchdown, the balloon's telltale in the vertical-speed trace and the long touchdown after it. My FS Flights captures the touchdown rate, position and speed of every landing automatically - which turns "that felt wrong" into "I flared high again, third time this week", which is the sentence improvement actually starts from.

Drills that build the judgement

The low pass. The single best flare drill in simulation: fly the approach, round out - and don't land. Hold the aircraft a few feet above the runway, power just above idle, and fly the length of it before going around. This isolates the exact skill (height-holding in the hold-off) and gives you thirty continuous seconds of it per pass, versus two seconds per normal landing. Five passes teach more height judgement than a month of ordinary circuits.

One variable, six laps. Circuit sessions with a single flare focus: today only the eye-shift, tomorrow only the progressive hold-off. Watch the touchdown numbers move lap over lap.

The spot-plus-rate game. Once touchdowns are consistently smooth, chase the full target: touchdown zone and sub-150 fpm and on speed. That triple is what an airline's data would call a good landing - and chasing all three at once is what finally cures the greaser-at-any-cost habit.

The flare will never be fully solved - real 20,000-hour captains still talk about it the way golfers talk about putting. That is the charm of it. But it stops being mysterious the day you give it eyes, structure and a record: look long, hold off, read your numbers, repeat. The last fifty feet are a skill like any other. They just have better lighting.