The plane just wouldn't come down — it skimmed along a third of the strip before touching
Every knot above Vref is stored kinetic energy, and energy stored at the threshold must be dissipated in ground effect before the aeroplane will stop flying. Because kinetic energy scales with the square of speed, the excess you must dissipate grows fast. At a 45-knot approach, five knots hot is over a tenth more speed and roughly a quarter more energy to get rid of in ground effect. This is why the fix is never in the flare. It was decided three miles earlier, on final, at the airspeed indicator.
If I keep easing the sink rate off it just floats and never touches down
A rate proportional to height never actually reaches the ground - it is an asymptote. Autoland systems add a small bias to force touchdown, and a pilot who flies the schedule perfectly all the way down will float. The last three feet are deliberately off the schedule: you stop reducing the rate and let the aircraft arrive. Chasing zero sink in the last three feet is precisely the greaser-hunting habit this article will come back to, because it is trained by the wrong incentive and it produces long landings.
The gentle hold-off that works in the Cessna makes the jet float forever
The light aircraft, with time in hand, is held off: the nose comes up progressively, speed bleeds towards roughly 1.1 times the stalling speed in the landing configuration, and the mains touch when the wing stops flying. The jet has no such luxury. The flare is a pitch change of a few degrees, a coordinated thrust reduction to idle, and an accepted, positive touchdown while the wing is still very much flying. Holding a jet off is not refinement, it is a float down the runway followed, in stretched variants, by a tail strike - tail clearance attitudes on common narrowbodies are startlingly close to normal touchdown attitudes, on the order of a few degrees of margin, and the flare in those aircraft stops when the geometry says so, not when the wing does.
I feel the cushion in the Cessna but the airliner gives me nothing
Ground effect becomes significant below about one wingspan of height. A Cessna 172, with a 36 ft span, enters ground effect at flare height - the float it feels in the hold-off is ground effect arriving on cue. An A320, with a span around 117 ft, has been in ground effect since before the threshold and there is no sudden cushion to feel, only a gradual reduction in induced drag that lengthens any float you allow.
Beautiful soft touchdown, but I floated halfway down the runway
Arrived fast. The landing the leaderboard loves: a beautiful number, half a runway behind you. Arrive 10 kt over VRef and the excess energy has to go somewhere; it goes into float, on the order of a couple of hundred feet per knot depending on type, and the touchdown, when it finally comes, is soft.
I'm fast over the threshold on every flight, even in calm weather
Speed additives for wind - Boeing and Airbus each have their formula - protect the approach on gusty days and cost you float on calm ones; applying them by habit on a still day is a common source of the fast arrival. The tiebreaker is threshold speed against VRef, not feel.
