Landing the Mosquito?

[Treetop64]

You're dropping your gear and flaps way too late, not allowing yourself enough time to trim the aircraft for landing, and are consequently rushing things on final.

By the time you turn on final everything should already be down, except for the last bit of flaps. On final you should only be lining up on the glideslope and establishing descent speed until touchdown, not trying to hurry up and drop everything in a mad rush before you land.

As a basic, general rule:
Downwind leg - drop gear and first increment of flaps.
Base leg - drop second increment flaps.
Final - Trim and adjust throttle for the glideslope (imaginary or otherwise) until touchdown.

Throughout, you're managing your speed and descent rate.

When established on final, you control your altitude/descent rate with throttle, and control your speed with the elevator.

Cut throttle as you pass the runway threshold, and - this is key - hold the aircraft just off the surface and let it settle itself onto the runway just before stall. When touching down, you're actually trying to just keep the aircraft from landing, not make it land. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that is the smoothest way to land an aircraft and comes naturally after a bit of practice.

Good luck!

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by Raven Morpheus

So what am I doing wrong?

Approach is too far towards the end of the runway. Sink rate too high. And because of both then the speed drops beyond stall-kaboom

Originally Posted by Raven Morpheus

I would try coming in from further away at 1000-2000ft but I'm afraid of ending up too short and not reaching the runway!

But that would be easier to correct - by slowly applying throttle -or even gradually to full throttle and go around.
Try another airfield, e. g. Iasi map, Husi airfiled, that one is on a hill and allows approaches where you can even go below airfield altitude.

Originally Posted by Raven Morpheus

I would also try trimming the plane but my trim controls are limited to either the hat switch on my flight stick (Thrustmaster T Flight Hotas X), the keys on my keyboard numerical keypad or my mouse wheel - and none of those are ideal as by the time I've got the plane trimmed to any decent fashion I've spent 5 minutes doing so due to constantly having to correct the trim up or down and then conditions change so I have re-trim!!

For landing I would overtrim elevator to nose high -I find it helps flaring the plane, rudder trim for some planes in the direction you will have to push the rudder, but most times no trim.

Generally I would say a landing a plane with an approach that is too fast, but not too high is much easier to make, than one too high but correct speed. For starters focus on a point about 100m in front of the runway, and fly your plane there with some more speed than landing would need.
At that point, with only a little altitude under your nose, flare the plane, e. g. drop the sink speed to almost none -it can help to apply a few RPM, but slowly, else torque does you in. Now you will glide nearly parallel to the runway, and will slow down gradually, thus your plane will start to descend and almost lands itself by then.

What can help is intentional belly landings, where you approach is as low as possible - fly low, very low at maybe double the speed you would usually use for landing, and then gradually decrease speed, extend flaps, but always keep your plane very low -keeps the sink rate low, and thats crucial. Belly landings with too great sink rates end in desaster, but you can usually touchdown at 250kph+ and walk away.

[Raven Morpheus]

Thanks guys I'll have another go tonight.

In the meantime are there any tutorials like the carrier landing tutorials by Zeus-cat, I found those immensely helpful and they've resulted in 1-2 out of 3 carrier landings (sometimes multiple landings in a row) being successful whereas before I had to rely on the autopilot to land on a carrier.

Something like those tutorial missions but for airfield/airstrip landings would be immensely helpful.

[JtD]

Can't help you with tutorials. But for any plane, take it to some altitude where you don't immediately crash and check the stall speed there. Drop flaps and gear as you would on a landing, nose up so that you maintain altitude and look at the speed when a wing or the nose drops. Add 30 km/h to that speed, and use it as a landing speed. Fly level at some altitude in the landing configuration at that speed so you get a feel for the control characteristics at that speed, and so that you know what throttle settings you need to maintain altitude. For the Mosquito at 50% fuel, try around 180 km/h with around 50% power. Should be slow enough for a decent landing, and fast enough for decent control.

[Raven Morpheus]

Hmm, I make 180kmh 111mph, which is slower than I tried last night, and about what I was trying when I first opened this thread.

I'll give what you've said a go though JtD.

Really want to be able to land this plane (and it'll probably help me with any other plane on land) as I'm currently doing the 633 Squadron addon campaign and I'm only on mission 2. I must have landed it on mission 1 though, but I think I probably belly flopped it and fluked a survival or dug the nose or something else in but still managed to survive...

[MaxGunz]

With planes that I can use manual prop pitch, I set it at 100% rpm and generally I can run at very low speed with 30% to 35% power. With P-40B it's about 33% right near stall which lets me run a bit faster while slowly descending.
Low power and high rpm has a kind of braking effect on higher speed, you can find a power setting and buzz along then lower yourself by backing off the power just a bit. But get real close to ground over a landing strip in IL2 and you get ground effect modeled (IL2 ground effect is/was only over landing strips) where you'd better be cutting power to land.

For fast speed landings, don't give it much flaps or you'll bounce badly.

Generally I like to touch down at the speed I took off or slightly less just to minimize the hops.

Once I'm down either way, the flaps come up to cut lift and help me stay landed. When I slow down more, 160-170kph or less, I can drop them for the drag.

[Notorious M.i.G.]

Going by your video, it looks like you were a bit too high and hot, and extended gear/flaps a bit too late. I've spent the last year or so showing some friends how to play, and the #1 cause of landing crashes I noticed was that they weren't giving themselves enough time/distance to set up a landing. I like to have everything ready (runway lined up, flaps down, gear out, trimmed etc) a good 30 secs before I expect to touch the runway, and only make minor corrections in those 30 seconds.

I threw together a little video of me putting the Mosquito down - I'm sure there's plenty of mistakes in there somewhere that a more regular Mossie flyer will correct me on, but the key is to be ready to land long before you do (for any plane really). I was also a little too twitchy on the throttle and touched down sooner than I expected, because I've been flying the P-36 a lot lately and wasn't used to the high landing speed and sitting so far above the ground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmdiRMxpMCc

I also noticed that it's a lot easier if you have the gunsight up to give you a reference as to where your nose is pointed. Otherwise you tend to guesstimate a lot.

[Raven Morpheus]

Originally Posted by Notorious M.i.G.

I also noticed that it's a lot easier if you have the gunsight up to give you a reference as to where your nose is pointed. Otherwise you tend to guesstimate a lot.

Thanks I'll have a few watches of that video and make some notes.

BTW how do you turn on the gunsight in the Mosquito, on my copy it's turned off, and I notice the guns are aimed to a point just left of the gunsight, kind of in the middle between the edge of the gunsight glass/plastic bit and the edge of the cockpit window on that side? (I'm running the latest DBW and TFM on patch 4.10.1m if that makes any difference)

All the other planes I fly the gunsight is on by default and the guns are zeroed in the middle of the gunsight (to 500m distance).

[JtD]

Press Shift+F1. But I'd recommend to use the not gunsight view, and raise your point of view for the best possible view over the nose (6DoF, you can use mouse). Keep some small part of the reflection in the sight, for reference, but don't have it centred there.

Check attached screens for different viewpoint, grab0007 is gunsight centred. It offers the worst view over the nose. grab0006 is possibly the easiest for landing, and grab0008 offers the best view. (Yes, I use a vertical monitor. I tend to read a lot and in game I get a good view at the instruments all the time.)

[Raven Morpheus]

Interesting view you have there.

I can't replicate it. I play on a landscape 21" widescreen LG TV and I set my FOV to 110% as that seems the most appropriate for me in most planes.

Plus in the Mosquito when I press Shift+F1 it zooms in and centres for the gunsight, but I can zoom out again to 110%. That's very odd because in other planes (mostly single prop fighters) the aiming reticule is displayed by default.

I also can't seem to raise the point of view up, I tried pressing S which I've assigned to raising the seat but that does nothing - any info on how to raise the view up in the Mosquito?