If You Think Landing Is the Hardest Part of Learning to Fly, You're Right

By then I was able to keep the plane steady as we raced down the centerline. I was able to climb out in a coordinated and measured way, searching the sky for traffic, until I hit our cruising altitude. By then I could arrest our climb with forward pressure on the yoke—a modest achievement as piloting goes, but one that really pleased me. A climbing plane wants to keep climbing, you see, and a hard nudge on the stick implies a willful hand and a made-up mind. I acted with authority and know-how to keep the plane in line, and on that day I remember feeling that at last I had command over the single-prop Piper Cherokee we called Six-Two Romeo.

By then I also knew how to keep our altitude steady, and how to let turbulence wash over the airplane without micromanaging the stick. And I knew how to pull the engine back from the red line when it started running hot. I knew how to lean (or thin out) the mixture upon reaching our cruising altitude and all the rest of the cruise checklist. I knew how to spot Greenwood Lake from 2,500 feet, that blue slit of water with its lonely eye of land. I knew how to do clearing turns over the practice area before I began my maneuvers, and I knew how to do my maneuvers

My maneuvers were not perfect, and my navigation was not perfect, and my communication with air traffic control was not perfect. I might not say this or that correctly, and I could flub the protocol with the best of them. But by then I knew that, however formal and stern air traffic controllers might seem, they allowed for honest mistakes.

"WHEN I SAY ADD POWER, I DON'T MEAN LITTLE TWISTS. I MEAN ADD POWER."

And by then I knew a bit more about the man next to me. Tom Fischer and I had been inside the tight confines of Six-Two Romeo for many hours together, on long days of blinding heat and short afternoons of freezing cold, and though I had tried to end his life in any number of interesting ways, he never took it personally. Nothing I did in the air rattled him. He was like the man who enters a snake pit or lion's den and has a -calming effect on all the savagery.

Tom kept his hands near the controls, especially during critical moments, but by then, he was just as likely to go quiet and stare out the window for traffic while I did what was necessary to pilot the plane. Those long stretches of silence as we cruised over the pine forests of New Jersey were very companionable. There was the rock quarry that looked at once like a pulled tooth and an entire mouth of molars, and there were the swimming pools and tennis courts of the rich, and there was the heavy swath of power lines like a scar upon the earth. These casual moments gave me a foretaste of the silence that would attend my first solo flight—the prospect of which, in idle moments, terrified me. But if it was like this, I thought, there was no reason to be scared. My confidence grew every time Tom went silent.

Daniel Shea

One day in October, we came in from the practice area north of Greenwood Lake and reported our approach to Caldwell Tower. I had been taking flying lessons for about ten weeks. A half-mile out, we joined the pattern on the downwind. The downwind is the first of three legs that finally puts you on the runway. Abeam the numbers, I reduced power and began to descend.

At 900 feet, I made my base turn into a modest tailwind. The view outside the windscreen was of a broad hillside blanketed by trees and toothpicked by signal towers and power lines. The runway was off to my right. I pitched for the right airspeed and trimmed the yoke. At 700 feet and falling, I turned base to final.

As the wing dipped heading into that final turn, the windscreen filled with earth, trees, houses. Trees et al have the power to terrify during a descent, when you seem to be heading straight for them belly-first. But by then I could anticipate and manage that fear. What I was seeing was the naturally occurring phenomenon of a customary landing. However, it takes a lot not to nose up, out of instinct, to put a little distance between your ass and the earth. By then I was trained not to nose up—"don't get pitchy," Tom liked to warn. But bad habits are hard to break.

Runway 22 was ahead of me now, just past the highway. To my dismay, I discovered that I was way off the centerline. I'd allowed myself to be blown off-course by the tailwind. I needed to crab over. Meanwhile I was falling more than a thousand feet per minute, and something was off. We were sinking.

We were sinking over I-80 and the Wayne Town Center shopping mall. The pines below me were whipping past like green skewers of death. The rooftops were rearing up, gaining compactness and detail.

"We're sinking, Tom."

"You got pitchy," he said. "And now your airspeed is off."

I had done my best not to nose up at the sight of all those fast--approaching trees, but the facts were the facts. If we were sinking, I had nosed up.

"Add power now," Tom said.

I heard the urgency in his voice. I reached for the throttle.

In Six-Two Romeo, the throttle works two ways: by pressing it in and out, like a foosball handle, for greater thrust; and by twisting the knob, which yields a more refined dose. At that moment I needed to really punch it, but for some reason, I just gave a pansy little twist. What's worse, I went the wrong way. We began to sink even faster.

"When I say add power, I don't mean little twists. I mean add power."

I punched in the power. It restored our lift and we climbed away from the trees and the rooftops. But we still had to land.

"Should I go around?"

"Going around is always an option," he said.

TOM WAS CONSTANTLY SAVING ME FROM HORRIFIC LANDINGS

This was one of Tom's refrains. He liked to tell the cautionary tale of a pilot who crashed at Caldwell trying to land when she should have gone around. "Having to go around is never the embarrassment," he said to me more than once. "The embarrassment is needing to go around and choosing not to."

"I think I'll still try for the runway," I said.

"Okay," he said. "Then you'd better start taking out some power."

Add power, take out power. Speed up, slow down. Climb, descend. Landing is a dance. Its orchestrations are challenging, intense, and variable. If you're doing something wrong, odds are it began seven moves back. How to fix it? Dance faster, better, mightier. Or go around.

We floated over the highway, still being pushed to the left by the tailwind. Now, because of the added power, we were too high. Tom told me to take out all the power. We started to sink again. He warned me to keep the nose down, but not to aim for the runway. Another refrain: "You can't force an airplane to land." I thought once more about going around. Dismissed that thought. And then—

Everything happened at once: We came down over the runway. I pulled way back on the yoke. We lurched to the right. The runway disappeared. I mean disappeared. I was inches from concrete going ninety miles an hour, staring up into a windscreen full of sky. How to correct? I had no idea. The controls in my hand might just as well have belonged to a video game flashing insert coin now. I stopped piloting and braced for impact.

Seconds later, Tom was calmly taxiing the two of us down runway 22.

Daniel Shea

Tom was constantly saving me from horrific landings. Over and over something went wrong. It was never the same thing twice. I came in too high. I came in too fast. I shied away from the tarmac. I lunged at the tarmac. I loved to get down really close and then roll the plane to the right at the last second for no reason at all, and then wobble over the runway like a fledgling bird. I came in crabbed when I should have been straight, and I came in straight when I should have been crabbed. I aimed for the runway as if the plane were a dart and the runway a bull's-eye, a sensible way to land only for wheel manufacturers and slow news cycles. When not aiming like a dart, I loved to pull up on the yoke too aggressively. That sent us back into a takeoff attitude right when we were trying to land and had no power to climb, and we flirted with a stall fifty feet in the air. No matter what the mistake was, things usually got so muddied and dire in the final seconds that I abandoned the controls out of sheer helplessness and prayed to Tom, the patron saint of hapless pilots.

To land well is to contend with paradox. You need patience when things are most hurried, composure when things are most fraught. You need focus when your attention is most scattered. You need to make small adjustments when only big ones seem appropriate. You need a light touch on the controls when the urge to yank and grip and pull them off the panel is at its strongest.

The first time I turned my attention entirely to Tom and watched him land Six-Two Romeo, I was moved to laughter by the complexity of it all. He was descending, turning the yoke, applying back pressure, lowering the flaps, adjusting the trim, peddling the rudder, adding power, nosing down—all more or less simultaneously. How many limbs the man had! How harmoniously they moved! I was put in mind of prodigies and athletes, of the grace that remains hidden until you see a man at his calling. He was passing cool as a cucumber over I-80. He was descending to the numbers on the runway. He was riding the flare like a man in a chute. When he finally kissed the rear wheels to the runway, the tarmac was as soft as a mattress of silk.

Daniel Shea

After that botched landing, I went home and reviewed landings in books and online. I watched -YouTube videos of small planes coming into Caldwell. The next time Tom and I went up, I didn't do any better. I also seemed to forget how to turn. I had coordinated turns down cold several lessons earlier. So why was every turn around the pattern now 45 degrees, as if I were trying to avoid enemy fire? I had a setback. A collapse. Call it what you want, I was back at square one—while also trying to land.

"Forty-five-degree turns are kind of fun," Tom said after we had returned to Fischer Aviation. "Just not in the pattern."

"Where did my brain go? Where did my feel go?"

"You were dismissing the throttle again, I don't know why. And we have to break you of pinching the yoke."

"I'm making errors because I'm pinching the yoke?"

"Yes," he said, shifting into a whisper for emphasis. "I don't make this stuff up."

"And then I get down there," I said to him about the actual landing, "and it's a complete mystery to me what I should be doing."

"Well," he said, "maybe we'll do a little sim stuff next time and we can really nail that part down. Because it shouldn't be that much of a mystery."

SHE HATED FLYING AND HAD BEEN ENCOURAGING ME TO QUIT

By then I knew that flying meant failing. I had failed at steep turns and I had failed at slow flight. I had failed to keep my altitude and I had failed to keep my heading. I'd had close calls and doh! moments, made mistakes of ignorance and mistakes of arrogance. Sooner or later, I got a handle on things. But there was something categorically different about the landing. You have to put all of the pieces together at once, with no time to spare, while staring into the -dragon's mouth.

"I don't think I can solo," I said to my wife that night.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to die."

"I don't want you to die, either. Why don't you quit?"

She hated flying and had been encouraging me to quit.

"I can't quit," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because I have to solo."

But the truth is, I wanted to quit. In the endeavor to do anything difficult, I inevitably quit a hundred different times, if only mentally. Something to vent the pressure for an hour or two, until the resolve returned. My resolve was a living thing, subject to changes in fortune. I had to tend to it, nurture it; sometimes that meant tricking it. If the temptation to quit wasn't ever-present, whatever I was doing probably wasn't that hard. One of the reasons I agreed to take flying lessons was the certainty that it would be hard. I'm a novelist; I take a perverse pleasure, obviously, in hard things. And because I knew it would be hard, I knew I would quit, at least mentally, a hundred different times.

To quit is to bow out before the achievement of a specific goal. My specific goal was to fly solo. That meant heaving Tom from the plane and heading up alone, which meant coming down alone, which meant landing alone. I could not comprehend how I ever expected myself to land without Tom beside me when almost without exception every one of my landings would have been very nasty, if not fatal, without his last-minute intervention. I knew how to take off just fine, I knew how to pilot around just fine. But landing? Oh, boy. There is an old-time humorous placard on the walls of Fischer Aviation that reads flying lessons: 50 cents. landings: $50. That monetizes the obvious: It's the landing, stupid.

That night in October, I woke up reeling with nightmares. No one in the world but me was awake, and my ears rang with the sound of the void. My heart was doing double time. I was filled with the darkest -forebodings and doubts. The only sane thing to do was retire this unhealthy pursuit. Yes, I'd been long fascinated by flight. I'd stopped in awe since I was a boy to watch planes descend overhead. But what was I trying to prove? That I could master the physical world? That as I was turning 40 I was still capable of transformation? That I was never going to die? I had watched my father die a few months earlier. Learning to fly seemed the right antidote to that gradual and ghoulish decline. A surge of power, a new strength. But at two in the morning after terrible dreams, in the abandonment of the hour, I could no longer rationalize it. This is foolishness, I thought. This is childish. Go back to getting by.

Then the weekend came. It must have restored my faith. Monday was bright and breezy, blue for miles, without a wisp of cloud. I drove out to Fischer Aviation expecting a few hours on the simulator. But something happened. Were we seduced by the beautiful day? By some strain of eternal hope? Without another word about the sim, Tom and I hopped into Six-Two Romeo.

Two hours later, we came out of the sky and taxied to the apron. We walked back to Fischer Aviation in silence. Tom filled out my logbook in silence. When he finally looked up at me, he said:

"Next time, we are doing the sim, rain or shine."

Daniel Shea

Early on, Tom tried to teach me how to do steep turns. He began with a demonstration. At a centripetally lively 45 degrees, Tom's turn consisted of a full revolution from left to right while the world unfurled like a filmstrip outside the windshield. The impression was of being on a swift and steady merry-go-round. Then he handed the reins to me. On my merry-go-round, all the horses were drunk and easily spooked and occasionally had to take a knee.

We returned from time to time to the steep-turn maneuver. So many lessons went by. Then one day I went up and executed my first nearly -flawless steep turn. I mean it had it all: an exact 45-degree bank, coordinated stick and rudder work, appropriate power adjustments, a continuous site picture, and the -perfect maintenance of altitude and speed. I came down, not just someone capable of steep turns but a changed man. I was high with achievement and delight, relieved of every burden.

EVERY ONE OF MY LANDINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN NASTY, IF NOT FATAL, WITHOUT HIS LAST-MINUTE INTERVENTION

Landings weren't like that. One thing would click into place—say, the all-important approach. Then the leveling off would go haywire. Or the flare. Or a crosswind would complicate matters. Or I'd forget how to turn.

What I did that day to convince Tom that I needed some serious sim work was aim the nose of the airplane directly at the runway. This is one certain way to put you uppermost in the minds of the National Transportation Safety Board.

"You were a little better than ninety on the airspeed indicator and just getting faster and faster," Tom informed me.

I felt the heat of indictment spread over my body. You see, I hadn't known I was aiming for the runway. It came as a complete surprise. Sure, I could see it now. I felt myself pushing the yoke forward. I felt the plane speeding up. I saw the runway getting closer and closer as I prepared to plant the nose of the plane inside the meat of the tarmac. But at the time, I believed myself to be executing a safe and proper landing.

A reversal like my coordinated turns suddenly going wonky on me was something I could contend with. But this startling news of Tom's was something different. At any moment, I could do something dangerous that I should not be doing without even knowing I was doing it. That was the unknown sneaking out of the darkness, a glimpse of what crouched in wait beyond the dimensions of even the best preparation.

That was enough. I was quitting. No solo. My wife was very happy. My editor was understanding. I couldn't bear to tell my flight instructor. I showed up for one final lesson, mainly to drop the news. But we went flying instead. And that was the day I had my first perfect landing.