What Is Landing?
Landing is a single approach, flown from about five hundred metres out and fifty metres up, onto six hundred metres of tarmac. There is one aim point painted on the runway and one number at the end of the flight that says how you did. The whole game is about a thing real pilots spend their entire training on: knowing where the wheels are going to touch while there is still time to change it.
The aeroplane is a light taildragger with a fixed idle power setting, so there is no throttle to reach for and no bolting on a bit more when the approach goes wrong. Your only control is pitch, the nose up and the nose down, and pitch does two jobs at once. That is exactly what makes the game a game rather than a chore. Pulling the nose up makes you go slower and makes you sink faster. Pushing it down makes you go faster and stretches your glide. You cannot ask for one without getting the other.
Two things are judged separately. Where the wheels touch is a planning skill: it says whether you understood your energy a kilometre out. How hard they touch is a flying skill: it says whether you could feel the aeroplane in the last three seconds. A landing can be excellent at one and poor at the other, and the game scores both rather than pretending they are the same thing.
How to Play
- Press start and the approach begins. The aeroplane is already flying and the power is already at idle. Everything from here is pitch.
- Look at the marker on the runway. It is a live forecast of where the wheels will touch if you do nothing from this moment on, and it is drawn on the tarmac as a small bracket. It reads to within about two metres of where you will actually land.
- Compare the marker with the aim point. The aim point is the painted block at 105 metres past the threshold. If the marker is short of it, you need less drag, so ease the nose down. If it is beyond it, you need more drag, so raise the nose.
- Do that gently. The forecast updates continuously, the aeroplane takes a moment to respond, and the single most common way to ruin this approach is to chase the marker back and forth with the stick. Small corrections, then wait and see what they did.
- Watch the numbers at the top of the screen. Speed is the one that matters most. The aeroplane holds itself up at 17 metres per second and quits flying at 13.4. If the speed number drops toward the low teens the wing is giving up and no amount of pulling will get it back.
- At roughly seven metres the ground effect starts and the last part of the flight begins. This is the flare. Keep raising the nose as the ground comes up, so that you are still pulling at the moment of touchdown and the aeroplane runs out of speed exactly as it runs out of height.
- Touch down, roll out, read the score. The label at the end tells you which of the two skills let you down, and it is usually not the one you think.
One approach per attempt. Your best score is kept in your browser and shown in the corner of the screen.
The Five Ways to Get It Wrong
There are only a handful of mistakes available here, and each one has a price the game will charge you for. Knowing the price is most of the skill, because the approach gives you thirty seconds to decide which one you are willing to risk.
- Touching down short
- The expensive one. Anything before the tarmac halves your score before the rest of it is even worked out, because it is the error a real pilot would call serious. When you are unsure between carrying a little more height and a little less, carry more.
- Touching down long
- Cheaper than short by more than half, because a long landing is still a landing. The runway is 600 metres and the aim point is 105 metres in, so there is a lot of tarmac behind it. You have more room to be late than to be early.
- Arriving hard
- Smoothness marks are worth as much as accuracy, and they come entirely from the flare. A snatch of back-pressure at two metres does nothing except start a balloon you then have to fix with no height left to fix it in.
- Ballooning
- Over-flaring. The aeroplane climbs away from the ground with the speed gone, then drops the last metre with nothing left to cushion it. The cure is the same as the cause: you were pulling too much, too late, so pull less, earlier, across the whole seven metres.
- Going around
- Five points. The aeroplane flies off the far end and the game scores it as a small failure rather than a crash, because that is what it is. Genuinely better than bending something, and genuinely worse than almost any landing you actually complete.
What Makes Rounding Out So Hard
The flare is the hardest five seconds in flying and it is worth asking why, because the game is a model of the answer rather than a puzzle invented to be difficult. On the approach you are flying an aeroplane that is doing what you asked and doing it slowly. In the flare you are asking it to stop flying, on purpose, at a controlled rate, at a height you cannot see and cannot measure.
The mechanism is a trade that runs the wrong way. Holding the nose up costs you speed, because every degree of extra attitude is more lift and lift is not free. As the speed comes off, the wing needs even more attitude to make the same lift, so the nose has to keep coming up just to hold the descent rate steady. That is a loop that closes on itself: the longer you flare, the more flare you need. Get it right and the aeroplane arrives at the ground with no speed left to fly on and sits down. Get it wrong and either you ran out of attitude before you ran out of height, which is a firm arrival, or you kept pulling and the wing quit, which is a very firm one.
What stops it being a coin toss is a number in the aeroplane's design: how much lift the wing can make before the airflow over it separates. In this model the aeroplane can pull 1.6 g at the approach speed. On the one hand that is a real limit you can hit and the game will let you hit it. On the other it is close to what a light aircraft actually does, since a real taildragger flares at about 1.2 g, and it is low enough that a flare is something you can feel your way through rather than a timing window measured in centimetres.
Why the aeroplane does not simply land itself
Close to the ground, the air underneath a wing changes. The vortices that trail off the wingtips, the ones that make up most of a wing's drag at slow speed, get squeezed against the surface and cannot form properly, so the induced drag falls away. The aeroplane floats. It is a real effect that has embarrassed a great many pilots, and it is in this model on purpose.
The first version of this game had it turned up too far, and it did something worse than being unrealistic: it landed the aeroplane for you. The model measured 1.79 metres per second of sink on the approach and 0.65 at touchdown with nobody touching the controls at all, so the cushion was doing the whole flare and the last three seconds were decoration. Flown hands-off, most approaches came out as firm rather than hard. The coefficient is now set so the effect is worth having and is not worth relying on. The same approach, measured at the same altitude with the cushion switched off, sinks at 1.79 metres per second instead of 1.63.
That measurement is also why the game exists in the shape it does. A sixteenth of a metre per second of difference is the entire contribution the ground makes to your landing. The rest of it, the difference between a greaser and a hard arrival, is you, and the aeroplane neither knows nor cares whether you were paying attention.
Reading the picture instead of the numbers
Real pilots are taught to land by looking at the picture out of the windscreen and not at the instruments, and the reason is that the instruments lag the aeroplane. The airspeed needle tells you what the wing was doing a moment ago. The runway growing in the windscreen tells you what it is doing now.
You have the same choice here and the same trade. The speed and sink readouts are accurate and they are honest, and a player who flies entirely by them will do fine. The marker on the runway is a forecast rather than a reading, a second simulation run forward sixty seconds, which is why it can tell you where you will touch before you have touched. A player who flies by the marker and the shape of the runway does better, because the marker is the one instrument in the game that is telling you about the future rather than the past.
It is also the instrument most likely to ruin your approach, which is a genuinely interesting problem. The forecast is truthful and it responds immediately to whatever you do, so it invites constant correction, and an aeroplane flown with constant correction never settles onto anything long enough to be measured. The technique that scores best in this game is to put the marker where you want it early, then leave the controls alone and let the aeroplane fly to the answer you already gave it. That is the least satisfying instruction in any game, and it is the correct one here.
A Thirty-Second Game You Can Play Anywhere
The whole approach takes between thirty and sixty seconds depending on how you fly it, which is short enough to play standing in a queue and long enough that the landing itself never feels rushed. That was a design decision rather than an accident. A game whose failure mode is "I did not have time to think" is a bad game to play on a phone, and the approach is deliberately long enough that you always have time to think.
On a touchscreen, hold the top half of the screen to raise the nose and the bottom half to lower it. It is a hold rather than a tap, and that is deliberate, because the control is a rate: the aeroplane keeps pitching for exactly as long as your finger is down. Nothing on this screen is timed, so the touch controls cost you nothing against a keyboard player.
On a desktop the up and down arrows change the pitch, and W and S do the same thing for anyone who plays with a hand on the left of the keyboard. P pauses, and so does escape. There is a fullscreen button in the corner of the stage if you want the runway bigger, which genuinely helps, because the flare is easier to judge when the horizon is further from the middle of your vision.