Aircraft landing at London City airport. LCY has a steep 5.5 degree glide path approach..(thus the already extended speed brake on the BAe)..



We are featuring LCY in the next issue of PC Pilot "Challenging Airports" series..

BeachAV8R

Once again I am shocked at the amount of side loading on the gear. Nasty little finish there.

I just don't understand why they don't do some positive rudder just before touchdown to get longitudinally aligned. But I guess they know what they are doing.

Yikes....next time I'm gonna take the train.

That's a crazy little airport! Not Lukla crazy...but "a bit mad"! Especially right in the middle of a city of 15 million...

Bah.

Y'all should come watch me land the Champ in gusting crosswinds.

Makes that look like a greaser!

How many hours have you got now Dart ? I am at 142. Jeez it seems like such a small number. Funny that I have 374 landings logged.

I'm such a rookie.

They didn't. They were way too late in flaring, and probably should have done a missed approach in the first place. That plane never flew out of LCY.

42 total hours.

320 landings.

I think everyone would appreciate FLARING the aeroplane before landing a little more.

I used to do a very steep approach in Metro 2's in the mid 90's when I flew into the secondary airport in Sydney at about 3am - I think they would have been more like 20°+ and there was no way you could flare off that, I'd have to add power to slow the rate of descent.
FWIW it was flight idle power, full flap, gear down, 105 kts indicated. The rate of descent was about 3,000 fpm so with a little headwind that makes for a pretty darn steep base & final leg.

On-topic - the BA-146 has extremely strong trailing-link landing gear so whilst it would have been a very firm landing if they tried that in a lot of other aeroplanes they might have pulled the wings off.