The Spot That Does Not Move
There is a simple, almost magical trick for judging whether you will reach the runway, and every pilot learns to read it. Pick the spot on the ground you are aiming for and watch it through the windscreen. If that spot slowly slides up and away from you, you are going to land short of it. If it sinks downward in the glass, you are going to overshoot. If it sits perfectly still while everything around it drifts outward, you are heading exactly there.
This works because of the way a steady descent looks from the cockpit. The one point you are truly tracking towards is the only point that does not move in your view. Everything nearer rushes past it, and everything beyond it rises away. Pilots call that fixed point the aiming point, and holding it still in the windscreen is the whole geometry of an approach reduced to something the eye can do without a single instrument.
Runways help by painting it on. Those broad white bars a little way in from the threshold are the aiming point markings, and a pilot flies the approach so as to keep them motionless in the same patch of windscreen the whole way down. The threshold itself slides under the nose. The aiming point stays put. Learn to see that and you can judge an approach in an aeroplane you have never flown before, because the trick belongs to the eye and the geometry, not to the machine.
Two Controls, One Path
Now the part that feels wrong the first time anyone says it. On a normal approach the pilot controls the speed with the nose and the descent path with the throttle. That is the opposite of the instinct, which says pull the nose up to climb and push it down to dive, and it is the single biggest idea in flying an approach well.
Think it through and it makes sense. Point the nose down a little and the aeroplane speeds up; raise it and the speed bleeds off, so pitch is the speed control. Meanwhile the engine decides how much energy is coming in: add power and the aeroplane stops sinking so fast and the path flattens, take it away and the path steepens. So to mend an approach that is coming in too low, the answer is not to haul the nose up, which only slows the aeroplane towards a stall, but to add power to lift the path while the nose holds the speed.
A glider has no throttle, and that makes the split even clearer, because it leaves only one of the two controls to play with. The glider sets its speed with the nose exactly as before, but to control the path it opens and closes its airbrakes, adding drag to steepen the descent or closing them to stretch it out. Same job, done with drag instead of thrust: the nose for speed, and something else entirely for the path down to the aiming point.
Trading It Away in the Flare
An aeroplane flown straight down the approach path onto the runway at approach speed would arrive far too fast and hit far too hard. The approach is deliberately flown a touch fast and a touch steep for good control, and that surplus has to be got rid of in the last few seconds. Getting rid of it is the flare, the gentle raising of the nose just above the runway that every good landing ends with.
In the flare the pilot eases off the descent, holding the aeroplane a foot or two above the surface and letting it slow. As the speed falls the wing can no longer quite hold the aeroplane up, and it settles onto its wheels at the slowest safe speed, nose slightly high, main wheels first. Done well it is barely a bump. The whole point is to touch down having already spent almost all of the speed, so the wheels meet the ground gently with little left to roll off.
Right down near the surface a helpful thing happens. The ground gets in the way of the swirls coming off the wingtips, the wing suddenly becomes more efficient, and the aeroplane wants to float on a cushion of its own making. This is ground effect, and it is why an aeroplane carrying a few knots too many will drift along the runway refusing to settle, riding that cushion until the extra speed finally bleeds away. Judging the flare, and not arriving with speed to burn, is the difference between a landing and a long embarrassed float.
Why It Is Flown Into Wind
Approaches are flown into the wind wherever possible, and the reason is groundspeed. The wing cares only about its speed through the air, but the wheels have to deal with speed over the ground, and a headwind makes those two very different numbers. Land into a headwind and the aeroplane can be flying at a healthy speed through the air while barely creeping over the runway.
The arithmetic is worth seeing. An aeroplane flying its approach at sixty knots through the air, into a twenty-knot headwind, is crossing the ground at only forty knots, so it touches down slow, needs little runway and stops quickly. Turn the same approach around and land the other way, and that twenty-knot wind now adds on instead, so the aeroplane meets the ground at eighty knots, eats up far more runway and punishes the brakes and tyres. Same aeroplane, same speed through the air, double the speed over the ground, all from which way the wind was blowing.
This is also why airfields point their runways into the prevailing wind, and why a pilot chooses the direction to land by the windsock rather than by convenience. When the wind blows across the runway instead of along it there are extra techniques for keeping the aeroplane straight, but those belong to a fuller discussion of wind. The core idea is the plain one: meet the air moving forward and the ground moving slowly, and the whole landing becomes calmer and shorter.
The Discipline of the Go-Around
The most important thing a pilot can do on an approach is give it up. If the approach is not right, too fast, too high, too low, drifting off the centreline, unsteady in any way, the correct answer is to abandon it, add full power, climb away and come round to try again. This is the go-around, and treating it as a normal option rather than a failure is one of the marks of a safe pilot.
Airlines put this into a rule with the idea of a stabilised approach: by a set height the aeroplane must be at the right speed, on the right path, in the right configuration and settled. If it is not, the crew go around, with no discussion. The reason is that a bad approach almost never mends itself in the last few hundred feet. It just runs out of room, and the accidents that happen close to the runway are very often approaches that should have been abandoned and were pressed on with instead.
You feel the sense of it in the games without anyone spelling out the rule. Rescue drops you onto tight, awkward spots where forcing a poor approach ends badly and setting up again is the wiser play, and Runway is a study in touching down on the right part of the tarmac at the right speed with enough left to stop. Both reward the same discipline the airlines drilled into a checklist: an approach is a plan, and part of the plan is a willingness to throw it away and fly the pattern again.