 Question on saving a botched landing
Doing touch-and-gos last weekend I flared on landing and ballooned
more than I expected. I realized that I didn't have the throttle 100%
out and was consequently carrying more power than I would have
normally been. Like a doofus, I went ahead and pulled power out all
the way and dropped the plane onto the runway from higher than I would
normally have liked. I didn't hurt the plane (thank goodness) but it
made me think about what I should have done.
I want to talk through my thinking and get opinions. I will, of
course, discuss this with my CFI but I won't see him for two weeks and
wanted it discuss it sooner than then.
First of all, there were almost no winds and I had almost 4K feet of
runway left to do whatever I was going to do.
My first, obvious choice is to go around. If there had been any kind
of wind that is what I would do and just call missed approach.
Assuming that I would rather just land the plane, I am trying to
figure out how to get back to a configuration to land. Because my
speeds were what I always target, to get the speeds down with extra
power means I had to be coming in a little nose high. Taking away
excess power, full flaps, nose high is a recipe for an immediate
stall. It seems to me that what I could have done would be to lower
the nose a little and then pull off throttle and simply fly straight
forward until the plane touches down. I don't really see that I can
pull the nose up to lose speed because I've already given up all my
descent speed by that point. In this somewhat messed up approach, is
there a better way to handle it?
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