User Guide

Flight Instruction
261
Flight Instruction
260
The airplane should settle into ground effect and touch
down gently. At that point, it’s up, over, and back on the airbrake
lever to activate “lift dump.” If you’re going to use thrust reverse,
wait until the nosewheel is on the ground, and you or the copilot
are holding it there with forward pressure, and verify that the two
ARM lights in the glare shield have illuminated, before you pull
up and back on the power lever “piggyback handles.”
CROSSWINDS
There’s another reason not
to hold the airplane off until the
last minute. Don’t forget that
the tips of those swept wings
are behind the landing gear:
the higher you hold the nose,
the closer they are to the
ground. If you’re instinctively
holding one wing down into a
crosswind, your tip-strike margin is even smaller! Instead, fly final
approach, wings level, in a slight crab if necessary. As you’re
about to touch down, once you’re used to the airplane, you can
“kick out” the crab without lowering a wing. If in doubt, just
touch down slightly crabbed - it’s not elegant, but the landing gear
is designed to take it - and it’s a whole lot more elegant than drag-
ging a wingtip through the runway lights!
A PIECE OF CAKE
As your final graduation exercise, we’re going to lose an
engine right at V1. Taxi back, get the airplane configured for take-
off, and check the tables for the correct V speeds for your current
weight. The Hawker has a nifty system called APR (Automatic
Performance Reserve); if the power levers are forward for takeoff
and the engine speeds split by more than 5%, it’ll automatically
tweak on a couple of extra per cent on the good engine to help
you through those first few anxious moments.
Off we go, using standard takeoff technique and callouts. At
V1, go ahead and chop one of the throttles to idle. You’ll feel a
slight swerve, but you’ll also feel the rudder pedal on the operat-
ing side go forward all by itself, courtesy of the rudder bias system.
This is where it takes discipline: don’t haul the airplane into the air,
wait for VR, which may seem like it’s a long time in coming.
A rough, but handy, rule of thumb is to allow yourself three
nautical miles of flight for every thousand feet of descent. This
means that if you’re crusing at 41,000 and heading for a sea-level
airport, you’d better start down about 120 miles out! As long as
you’re above 10,000 feet and the air is smooth, there’s no point in
wasting time: ease the nose down to just short of the barber pole
and adjust power to maintain the necessary rate of descent. At
about 12,000 feet you’ll need to pull off a good deal of power
and/or use the airbrakes to slow up to 250 knots; then continue
toward the airport, adding drag in the form of flaps as necessary.
LANDINGS
Just as you calculate a speed for takeoff, so must you (or
your copilot) figure one out for landing approaches, based on
your weight. This is where those fuel counters come in handy,
since you know how much less you weigh now than when you
took off. The appropriate chart in the flight manual will give you
the right speed, called “reference speed” or VREF. This is actually
the speed at which you should cross the runway threshold to be
guaranteed the right amount of energy in the flare and touch-
down; there’s no reason, unless you’re headed for a very short
runway, to fly the approach at less than about “ref plus ten” when
maneuvering, and “ref plus five” on short final. Many pilots feel
more comfortable adding half the value of any wind gusts if
they’re less than 15, or full gust value if they’re higher, to their
final approach speed. It’s also a good idea to calculate a V2 for
your landing weight, just in case you have to go around and have
the bad luck to lose an engine while doing so. If you plan to use
thrust reverse, this is a good time to turn on the two power switch-
es and verify that the white OFF lights extinguish.
TOUCHDOWN
Unlike in a light plane, you don’t want to hold a jet off the
runway until you reach minimum speed. Not only will it float a
long way down the runway, but if you get slow enough to fire the
stick pusher you’ll suddenly find yourself “planted.” Instead,
when you get down to about 20 or 30 feet (by radio altitude or
copilot callout), smoothly pull the power levers all the way to idle
and “hold what you’ve got” in pitch attitude.
SimTip
Toggle between forward
and reverse thrust modes by
pressing the R key.