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MY FS FLIGHTS
Flight Score
Departure
Apply small rudder corrections against a point at the far end of the runway to hold the centreline during the roll.
What happened: The aircraft tracked 6.8 m off the runway centreline during the ground roll, and flights with this pattern usually carry extra bank, around 9.8°, into the first climb.
Watch for: Heading indicator: wings level, tracking the runway centreline
Arrival
Track the centreline through touchdown using small rudder corrections against a point at the far end of the runway.
What happened: The aircraft touched down off the centreline at 16 m, and drifting off centreline at touchdown usually carries through into the rollout, as it did here with alignment reaching 18 m.
Watch for: Watch runway centreline position, keeping deviation inside the limit through touchdown and rollout.
A small uncorrected heading error at 40 knots becomes a metre of offset per second by 100 knots, noticed only at rotation, producing a crabbed liftoff. Root cause is nearly always eyes on the tape instead of the far end of the runway. Small heading changes displace a distant point visibly long before the nearby centreline stripes look wrong.
Read more in Improve Your Take-OffsStart to finish · 14 stages, 12 in the score
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Taxi out
The roll
A clean takeoff
Rotated at 72 kt against the 68 kt rotate speed, the nose rising at 2.4° a second, then held 5.7° from 35 ft, within 0.6° top to bottom.
Rotated on speed at a steady rate, and the climb attitude held. This is the takeoff to repeat: the same speed check, the same pull, the same attitude.
Liftoff and climb
Plan view the roll down the 721 m runway.
Rolled from the start of the runway, drifted left of the centreline, 6.8 m at the widest, and lifted off 4.5 m left. Airborne 48 % of the way down the runway, before the 75 % line.
The roll from above, with your left at the top. The line is where the wheels went, and "widest" is the furthest you drifted off the centreline. Lifting off before the amber 75 % line gets full marks for the roll length.
Side view from the start of the roll to 50 ft.
Reached 35 ft with 80 m of runway left.
The takeoff from the side: the height above the runway against the distance along it. The numbers along the runway are the speeds reached at each point. Lifting off in the amber last quarter of the runway costs marks for the roll length. The dark stretch of the roll is the run with the nose up and the wheels still on, with its length and time under the runway.
Speed and pitch from brake release to the end of the climb, against time.
Two traces from brake release: the airspeed on top, and below it the pitch, which is how far the nose is above the horizon. The dashed green line is the speed to rotate at for this aircraft at its weight, and the green dot is where the nose started to come up. The grey band is the run between the nose coming up and the wheels leaving the runway. The figures at liftoff are the pitch then and how fast the nose came up, in degrees a second. The grey dashed line across the pitch is the attitude held from 35 ft to the end: a nose held steady is a climb speed that holds, and the airspeed trace sits directly above it to compare.
Left-hand, 1,000 ft circuit height. The plan shows your circuit over a textbook one for this runway; the profile unrolls the same path from liftoff to the threshold.
Plan landing direction to the left; in pale blue the textbook circuit for your downwind speed, 1.2 nm out at 122 kt
The lap from above, with the landing direction to the left: the opposite of the runway drawings. The wide pale-blue line is a textbook circuit for your downwind speed - the downwind a mile out for every 100 kt, every turn at 30° of bank - and your track is drawn over it, each leg in the colour of its mark. The numbers are the four turns, the same as on the profile and the cards below. The 45° line from the threshold is the usual point to turn onto base.
Around the circuit height and bank; the turns are shaded
The same lap straightened out, so the height and the bank can be read together. Each shaded stretch is a turn, numbered as on the plan. The green box is circuit height, 1,000 ft, on the downwind. The amber line is 30° of bank, and a turn's steepest bank shows red above 32°. "Turn crosswind from" is the lowest height to start the first turn at.
Off heading: 8° from the leg's heading on average.
Each lap slightly wider and higher than the last, because you're unconsciously using the previous lap as your reference instead of the runway and the numbers. Invisible lap to lap, unmistakable across ten. This is the failure that only measurement catches, because your memory of lap three is gone by lap eight.
Read more in Pattern WorkOff heading: 9° from the leg's heading on average.
Spacing cues are relative to your eyepoint, so two simmers with different FOV settings following the same wingtip cue fly patterns half a mile different in width, and a wide FOV compresses depth so the runway on base looks further away than it is, biasing you towards a late turn. Pick a camera position and FOV, save it, and never change it, because every judgement you calibrate is calibrated to that picture.
Read more in Pattern WorkSteep: 36° of bank.
Bank angle in the pattern is conventionally kept to 20 to 30 degrees, and the base-to-final turn is where that convention earns its keep. Stall speed rises with bank because the wing must produce more lift in a turn. Roughly 7 per cent higher at 30 degrees, about 19 per cent at 45, and around 40 per cent at 60. At 65 kt on base you don't have much margin to spend steepening a turn to salvage an overshoot.
Read more in Pattern WorkGood: full marks on the turn.
The final from 4 nm.
Profile height against the 3° glideslope, with its 2° band in green.
Inside the glideslope band from 0.6 nm, where the final began, to the threshold, never more than 70 ft above the slope.
Your height above the runway against the distance still to go. The glideslope is the steady descent path to the aiming point, 305 m past the threshold: 3° here, which is about 320 ft for every nautical mile out, crossing the threshold at about 50 ft. The row under the distances is the height it puts you at. Inside the green band your path is drawn green; outside it, amber.
Plan distance off the extended centreline, your left at the top, with the 1° band. Sideways distances are drawn 3× larger than distances along the final.
Inside the 1° band from 0.6 nm, where the final began, to 0.3 nm, then 15 m right of it from 0.3 nm to the threshold.
Looking down from above, flying left to right towards the runway: up the page is left of the centreline, down is right. Sideways distances are stretched so that small drifts show, so a line that looks wild here may be only a few tens of feet. The labels are how far off you were at each distance, amber when outside the band.
Speed against the approach speed. The green band runs from 5 kt slow to 34 kt fast at the 1,000 ft gate, closing to 20 at 500 ft and 10 at the threshold.
Fast from 0.6 nm, where the final began, to the threshold (up to +36 kt).
Your indicated airspeed down the final, against the approach speed for this aircraft at its landing weight. The band allows 5 kt slow and more on the fast side further out, closing as you get lower, because the speed is expected to come off on the way down. The figures are knots above (+) or below (−) the approach speed.
Over the threshold
Perfect landing flare
Touchdown
Rollout
Side view — the last 721 m of the approach.
Began the flare at 17 ft, 112 m before the threshold; crossed the threshold at 10 ft, 40 ft below the 50 ft target. Touched down 70 m in, 235 m short of the ideal 305 m.
The last stretch of the approach and the touchdown, from the side. The height is stretched so that the last few feet show: 80 ft top to bottom, against 721 m across. The dashed line is the ideal, 50 ft over the threshold and down 305 m in. The flare ring is where you began raising the nose, and "descent slowed" is where the sink came off; the figures beside them are the sink rate, pitch and speed at that point.
Sink and pitch — through the flare, lined up with the side view.
The sink went from 220 fpm at the flare to 50 fpm at touchdown. The nose came up 3.8° on the way down. Into the flare at 77 kt, 10 kt over the 67 kt approach speed, and 65 kt at touchdown.
Lined up with the side view above, so a point on one sits under the same point of the other. On top, how fast you were coming down: 0 is level, and −600 is 600 ft a minute down. Below, the pitch. In a flare the nose comes up and the descent slows towards 0. The figure at the touchdown line is your touchdown rate.
Plan view — the full 721 m runway, to the same scale as the side view.
Touched down 16 m right of the centreline, and stayed about there down the rollout, 12 m right at the widest. Calm: nothing to correct for. Touched down with the nose 3° right of the track, wings level.
The runway from above, with your left at the top. Touching down inside the green bracket scores full marks for the distance. The shaded part is the rollout, up to where it ended. The wind is the one recorded at the landing, split along the runway (headwind or tailwind) and across it. To hold the centreline in a crosswind the nose points a little into wind - the crab - and is straightened with rudder just before the wheels touch, often with the into-wind wing lowered to stop the drift. The sentence gives the nose against the direction you were actually moving as the wheels touched, and the steepest bank as they touched, the figure the touchdown's Bank tile marks. The rest of it is shown for reading, not marked.
The 70 m touchdown sits inside the full-score zone. The arrival was smooth.
The stop — touchdown to taxi speed.
From 63 kt at touchdown to taxi speed (30 kt) in 14 s, an average deceleration of 0.13 g.
Your ground speed from the moment the wheels touched until you were down to taxi speed, against the distance rolled. A steep line is hard braking, a shallow one a long, gentle roll. For scale, an airliner's lowest autobrake setting decelerates at about 0.15 g, a medium one about 0.3 g. Shown for reading; not marked.
The rest of the report
The Commander 114 departed from runway 19R at EDUD Reinheim Airfield. Take-off used 362 m, which is 50 % of the runway, and rotation occurred at 72 kt. Local weather was 6 °C with wind 1 kt from 238°, giving a 1 kt headwind and 1 kt crosswind.
Initial climb to 50 ft agl took 8 seconds, averaging 368 fpm and reaching 96 kt at the top of the climb.
The aircraft entered a left-hand circuit for runway 19R. The downwind leg was less than 1 nm and lasted 27 seconds at 920 ft agl; the base leg was also less than 1 nm and lasted 14 seconds. The circuit was completed in about 2 minutes.
On final approach the aircraft stabilized with a threshold speed of 69 kt, which was judged good. The flare was described as perfect. Touchdown occurred at 65 kt with a rate of -51 fpm, also judged good. Touchdown distance was 70 m, considered good, and the total landing distance was 387 m (54 % of the 721 m runway). No bounce occurred.
Alignment on touchdown was significantly off centreline, 16.4 m to the left, and the rollout remained misaligned by 17.7 m from centreline.
The flight covered 4 nm in 3 minutes and consumed 2 kg of fuel.
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