How to Land a Plane Smoothly in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Ask any sim pilot how a flight went and they will answer with the landing. You can hand-fly a two-hour leg through weather, manage the descent perfectly and track the localiser like it is painted on, but if the arrival is a thump, the whole flight feels like a thump. That instinct is not wrong - the landing is the one manoeuvre where energy, judgement and timing all get marked at once. The good news is that a smooth landing is not a gift some pilots have and others don't. It is a measurable outcome with a small number of causes, and every one of them can be trained.

What "smooth" actually means

The number that defines a smooth touchdown is vertical speed at the moment the wheels meet the runway, measured in feet per minute (fpm). On a normal approach you descend at somewhere between 600 and 800 fpm. The whole art of the landing is bleeding that away in the last few seconds so the aeroplane arrives with almost none of it left.

As a rough grading scale, based on how My FS Flights scores every recorded touchdown:

• Better than -50 fpm - a perfect touchdown. The passengers ask if you have landed yet.
• -50 to -100 fpm - excellent. Barely a rumble.
• -100 to -150 fpm - smooth. This is a genuinely good landing in anything.
• -150 to -200 fpm - good. Solid, professional, nothing to apologise for.
• -200 to -300 fpm - fair. You felt it.
• -300 to -400 fpm - firm. Everyone felt it.
• -400 to -500 fpm - hard. The overhead lockers have opinions.
• Worse than -500 fpm - very hard. In the real world, engineering wants a word.

Two things about that scale are worth saying straight away. First, the difference between "excellent" and "firm" is about 250 fpm - roughly four seconds of normal descent rate. The margins are tiny, which is why landings feel difficult. Second, the scale has a floor for a reason: in the real world a touchdown around -600 fpm can trigger a mandatory hard-landing inspection. Your sim airframe will forgive you. Treat the numbers as if it wouldn't.

The greaser myth

Before fixing hard landings, one caution: the softest possible touchdown is not always the best landing, and chasing greasers can teach bad habits.

A landing is judged on more than touchdown rate. Where you touch down matters - a gentle kiss two-thirds of the way along the runway is a worse landing than a firm arrival in the touchdown zone, because the overrun at the far end does not care how softly you got there. Airlines actually brief firm touchdowns on wet or contaminated runways, deliberately, because a positive arrival breaks through surface water and gets the wheels spinning and the braking working. And a long, floating flare that produces a soft touchdown has usually eaten hundreds of metres of runway and a chunk of airspeed judgement to get it.

So the target is not "as soft as possible". It is a touchdown in the right place, at the right speed, with a low sink rate. Somewhere between -50 and -200 fpm, on the aiming point, on speed. That is the landing worth practising.

The five most common causes of a hard landing

Nearly every ugly arrival in the sim comes from one of five errors. Work out which ones are yours and you know exactly what to practise.

1. Too fast over the threshold

Excess speed is the most common landing error in simulation, partly because it doesn't feel like an error - the approach feels fine, right up until the flare. Cross the threshold 10 knots fast and the aeroplane has more energy than the flare is designed to dissipate. It floats, you wait, the speed decays unevenly, and you eventually arrive out of rhythm - either dropping it on from the float or forcing it down flat. Every aircraft has a reference landing speed (VRef) for its weight and configuration. Find it, fly it, and cross the threshold within a few knots of it. If you fix only one thing on this list, fix this one.

2. An unstable final approach

A landing is the last four hundred feet of an approach, and an approach that arrives at that point high, fast, low, slow or still being wrestled into configuration hands the flare a problem it cannot solve. If you are still correcting big errors at 500 feet - large power changes, chasing the glidepath, trimming out of a slip - the touchdown quality is already mostly decided. The professional answer is the stabilised approach: by a defined gate (500 feet works well for light aircraft in visual conditions), you are configured, on speed, on the glidepath, with a normal descent rate. If not, go around. It feels drastic in a sim where nothing is at stake. It is also how airline pilots land smoothly with such boring consistency.

3. Flaring at the wrong height

The flare - the gentle pitch-up that trades the last of the descent rate for a soft arrival - is a timing problem, and both directions of mistiming hurt. Flare too high and the aeroplane runs out of energy above the runway, stops descending, then drops the last few feet vertically. Flare too late and you simply fly into the ground at approach descent rate. The fix is the sight picture: in a light aircraft, begin the flare at roughly the height of a house roof - 10 to 20 feet - and shift your eyes to the far end of the runway as you do. Looking at the far end gives your brain the height and drift cues it needs; staring at the tarmac in front of the nose is the single most common reason pilots cannot judge the flare. In airliners, the radio altimeter callouts do the measuring for you: for something A320-sized, "thirty" is the cue to begin.

4. The wrong aiming point - or none at all

Many sim pilots have never consciously chosen where on the runway they intend to touch down, and the landing shows it. Pick the aiming point markers - the two broad white blocks about 300 metres past the threshold - and fly the approach so they stay fixed in the windscreen. If they drift down the glass, you are overshooting them; if they climb, you are coming up short. A fixed aiming point turns the approach into a closed loop you can correct early, instead of a surprise you meet at 50 feet. It also keeps the touchdown in the touchdown zone, which - see the greaser myth above - is half of what makes a landing good.

5. Stopping flying when the wind hasn't

Wind does not switch off at the flare. A gust lost in the last 20 feet steals airspeed exactly when you have none to spare; a crosswind left uncorrected turns a straight touchdown into a sideways one, which feels hard even at a gentle sink rate because the gear is being loaded sideways. The habit to build is that the flare is not the end of flying - it is the busiest part. Keep flying the aeroplane through the touchdown and into the rollout: into-wind aileron, straight with rudder, and be ready to add a small burst of power if a gust drops you. On gusty days, carry a few extra knots on approach (a common rule is half the gust factor) and accept a slightly firmer, positive touchdown rather than a long float in shifting air.

How to actually practise

Reading about landings improves nothing. Flying twenty of them does - if they are flown deliberately rather than as the last minute of long flights.

The most efficient landing practice is circuit work: take one aircraft you know to one runway, and fly the traffic pattern - take off, fly a rectangular circuit, land, and go again. Each lap is about six minutes and ends in a landing, so a half-hour session gives you five touchdowns under identical conditions. That repetition under controlled conditions is what turns flare timing from a guess into a feel.

Keep the variables fixed at first: same aircraft, same runway, calm preset weather. Once landings are consistently in the smooth band, add one difficulty at a time - a 5-knot crosswind, then 10, then gusts, then a shorter runway. Changing one variable per session tells you exactly what each condition does to your technique.

And decide, before each circuit, on your two numbers: the speed you will cross the threshold at, and the point you intend to touch down on. A landing flown to targets can be judged. A landing flown on vibes can only be shrugged at.

You can't improve what you don't measure

The catch with all of this is that the sim doesn't tell you how you did. The touchdown feels soft or it doesn't, and human feel is a poor instrument - a long float onto the mains can feel identical to a genuinely good landing, and a firm-but-perfectly-placed arrival often feels worse than it was.

This is exactly the problem My FS Flights was built for. Run the companion app, fly as normal, and every landing is recorded and scored automatically: touchdown rate in fpm with its grade, speed across the threshold against your reference speed, how far past the threshold you touched down, and how well you held the centreline - for every flight, in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024, X-Plane and Prepar3D. A session of five circuits stops being a vague impression and becomes five rows of numbers you can compare, and next month you can look back and see the trend.

Because the truth about smooth landings is that nobody arrives at them by talent. Pilots who land smoothly are pilots who know their numbers - and the only way to know your numbers is to see them.