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There are basically four stages to the landing: approach, flare, hold off and touchdown.

Approach: nail your speed on the approach (by flying the appropriate attitude - do not needle chase). There are a number of different ways of assessing whether you are high or low but we tend to use runway aspect (i.e. its apparent shape). If you are too high at will appear long and thin; if you are too low it will appear short and fat. In piston aircraft use power to control your rate of descent (i.e. to keep the aspect of the runway as you want it).

Flare: as you reach flare height the runway will appear to flatten out in front of you (some people say it suddenly feels as if you are driving on it rather than flying to it; others say use your peripheral vision and you have a sense of the grass being about level with your ears). Put simply the flare is nothing more than a single action to convert the plane from its descent attitude to a slightly nose up attitude. Remember: you are not looking to touch down at this point. Looking some distance down the runway establish the aircraft initially at slightly nose high of its level attitude. Pilots who pitch too nose high in the flare (i.e. balloon) are generally not looking far enough ahead.

Hold-off: you are now looking to bleed off as much speed as possible before you touch down. In other words hold the aircraft just off the runway for as long as possible (hence its name 'the hold off'). The ideal would be to keep it off the runway until the aircraft can no longer fly which is why a tickling stall warner two feet above the ground is not usually a bad thing. We tell our students to do everything they possibly can to prevent the aircraft touching down - only when there was nothing more humanly possible to do have they accomplished the perfect landing.

Clearly, the trick is to keep easing back on the stick (i.e. holding the aircraft in level attitudes for ever-decreasing airspeeds). If you balloon during the hold off just keep the stick where it is (never push forward), the aircraft will run out of energy and start sinking again. If you are a little high and are sinking too quickly simply arrest sink by applying power or go around.

Touch down: provided all the above goes well, touchdown is simply a matter of keeping the aircraft straight with rudder pedals and gently allowing the nose wheel to come down. If you land heavily, keep the stick back - do not be tempted to push forward. If you bounce, your best bet is to go around and definitely go around if you bounce higher than the wingspan of the aircraft. If you are struggling to maintain directional control of the aircraft on landing, you are almost certainly landing too fast and flat (i.e. not holding off for long enough). On grass or an uneven surface it is very important to land as slowly as is aerodynamically possible because if you hit a rut or rabbit hole and bounce back into the air, you don't want the aircraft to be able to 'fly' - a stalled condition is far more preferable as the aircraft will simply drop back down again.

Remember: most landing accidents on light aircraft are nose wheel collapses or prop strikes. These are caused by pushing the stick forward during the landing phase (there should almost never be a reason to push the stick forward during landing) and landing flat and fast (in PA28's and C152/172's the stick should be fully back before touch down).

ST