If you’ve ever practiced balked landings in a Skylane, you know how critical it is to keep the heavy nose down when transitioning out of the flare and into climb when configured with flaps, nose-up trim and full power. Our recent scan of 100 recent wrecks proved that Skylane pilots might benefit from more practice for these situations.
That’s because a whopping 47 percent of the 182 wrecks that made the NTSB reports fell into the RLOC, or runway loss of control, category. Our research became monotonous with an ugly pattern of landings gone bad, resulting in busted nosewheels, bent firewalls and twisted airframe structure. While some were benign prangs that resulted from not managing the flare, touchdown, crosswinds or simply not maintaining directional control, other landings were downright out of control, resulting in fatalities. These contributed to a total of 16 fatal crashes in our random research.