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What to Do When Your Airplane Becomes a Balloon

By Doug Daniel

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Published: 21Apr2009
Word count: 758
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No landing is perfect. To be realistic, every landing, good, bad, and indifferent, is a series of recoveries from things gone wrong. The secret is identifying the 'problem' early and taking the corrective action quickly enough that only the pilot knows that something was less than perfect. So when you bounce, balloon or mush, don't feel bad-it happens to all of us.

The last stage of an ideal landing is slow flight just above the runway. But not just any slow flight, it must be a carefully cross-controlled slow flight. That is unless you want to start heading for the exit as soon as your wheels touch. Since an airplane lands on its mains first - or at least should be landed on its main wheels first - as you prepare to land, you had better point the wheels in the direction you want to go after you land. But none of this ever happens perfectly.

If the pilot lifts the airplane's nose too rapidly or too far, the wings lift too hard. What seems like a nice transition from approach glide to slow flight becomes an unexpected climb well out of ground effect. Of course both gravity and drag slow the airplane as it rises. It is not unusual for the plane to be dangerously close to a stall and high enough to experience a damagingly hard landing before the pilot corrects the situation.

This then is a balloon. Two important questions come to mind. How to prevent a balloon and how to recover from one? As an aside, I once bounced an airplane that would have ballooned anyway, creating what might be called a bouncing balloon. They talked about that one for sometime.

It is possible to make a fairly rapid transition from glide to slow flight without ballooning. But it's hard. It is much easier to simply start the flare ten feet higher. You see, the problem with flaring low is that more lift is required to decelerate the plane to zero vertical speed than is required to hold the plane in level slow flight. If the flare is started fairly low, much more lift is required to slow the descent. Once the vertical speed has been eliminated, the pilot doesn't need the excess lift. So quite often the pilot actually needs to lower the nose after the flare without touching down quite yet-a tricky maneuver. I have always felt that one of the secrets to successful flying is keeping it as simple as possible. So I advocate a more sedate flare timed so that the plane will be in a pretty nose-high attitude as it gets really close to the runway.

It seems that no matter how many hours are written in the logbook, from time to time, I balloon or bounce. I hate to admit that I feel a little smug when I am sitting in the back of an airliner and the captain does it, too. I was chatting with a United skipper not too long ago and discover that we both recover the same way. Once we sense the ground dropping away, we hold a constant pitch attitude, and, if needed, ease in a little more power to slow the inevitable descent. What works in a Cessna 152 works in a Boeing 767.

If it bounces, the principle is exactly the same. The only difference is that you end up too high and too slow for a different reason. The thing not to do is try to correct by pushing the nose down. This could result in pilot-induced-oscillations that those old geezers who hang out at airports will be talking about for months.

Once the plane balloons or bounces, it goes up and slows down. Then it comes back down. It could be tempting to slow the descent by pitching up. That could risk a stall resulting in a hard landing. If the pilot pushes forward to keep from stalling, that too, could cause a hard landing. The most embarrassing is when the pilot pushes forward on the elevator, the airplane starts down, the pilot pulls back on the elevator to keep from whacking the runway and goes into a secondary balloon, bounce or even stall.

I hope I have convinced you to just keep the pitch attitude steady, see what the plane is going to do, then add power if the situation requires it. That way, if you bounced it, you can smile at the passenger in the right seat and say that you needed to log an extra landing this month.

Doug Daniel is a long time pilot, flight instructor, sailor and author. His passion is sharing his insights with all who love to fly. His writing focuses on flying techniques designed to make flying easier and safer. If this was interesting, visit his website at http://www.FlyingSecretsRevealed.com/flying_questions/

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