Landing the BF-109

[kimosabi]

There is absolutely no problem making a straight approach landing if you're doing a slightly shallow one, and use your peripheral sight.

[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by kimosabi

Another thing worth mentioning is throttle and flare. I always have 20-25% throttle and starts to flare a bit just when I cross the fence. If you hover by doing so(you should) just decrease throttle slowly to control the touch down. Actually, when I think of it, I always flare before touchdown. Especially in a 109. A 109 is one of the easiest planes to land IMHO but having lots of hours in it would help, I guess. A spit is much more difficult to touch down.

A lot of aircraft in game need a fair bit of throttle right through the flare when you come in dirty with flaps fully deployed. Its almost impossible to do the classic Cessna "cut throttle on threshold and flare" unless you have no flaps dialed in at all.

As a side note some models of the 190 were apparently not rated for deadstick landings at all, if an engine failed the recommended procedure was to gain as much height as possible and bail.

As a good rule of thumb, designers of aircraft at that time tended to make the recommended final approach speed 30% higher than stall speed (this is now legislated for civilian aircraft) so if you do not know the actual Vref for an aircraft just work out the speed it stalls at and multiply that by 1.3 for an estimate of the historically correct speed across the runway threshold.

[kimosabi]

Yep, but it's not impossible to make a nice and smooth touch down with the "Cessna approach" either. You just have to know the aircraft and how it bleeds in a dirty config. From there you can get a feel on how much speed you need to have when you cut throttle over the threshold. The 109 floats much better than a Spit so it can be done. Actually, I never used to do the 25% throttle over the threshold before. Back then it was always a bit high approach, cut over threshold and flare gently until touchdown.