Landing

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle." - Neil Armstrong, from In the Shadow of the Moon, p408. 

Reasonable.

Reasonable indeed. Armstrong’s point is a nice example of the difference between the tool and the craft.

For a pilot, the airplane is not merely a vehicle to endure until arrival; flying is the activity itself. Walking away from the airplane after landing is just the absence of a problem. The satisfaction comes from having managed a complex, dynamic system well — especially the landing, where judgment, timing, and skill all come together.

There is also a very Armstrong-like modesty in the quote. He is pushing back against the popular image of the astronaut as someone whose main achievement is simply surviving a dangerous adventure. For him, the professional achievement was doing the job correctly. A good landing is not "I escaped"; it is "I executed."

It reminds me of a craftsman who doesn't take pride in having merely finished a piece of furniture, but in the quality of the joints and the way the grain was handled. The completed object matters, but the pride is in the mastery of the process.

Armstrong was particularly known for this attitude. After Apollo 11, many people wanted to talk about courage and heroism; he tended to talk about engineering, teamwork, and doing what the mission required. The first person on the Moon famously described the landing almost like a test pilot describing a flight condition: there were things to manage, and they managed them.

A good line might almost be: "Amateurs celebrate that they arrived; professionals take satisfaction in how they got there."

Landing is almost entirely the important skill.

Yes, especially in the context Armstrong was speaking from. Landing is where many of the pilot's skills are most concentrated.

Takeoff is important, but it is usually a more controlled, planned event: the runway is known, the aircraft is configured, power is applied, and the procedure is largely repeatable. Cruise flight often involves monitoring and managing systems. Landing, by contrast, is a constantly changing problem. The pilot must integrate:

    airspeed, altitude, and descent rate;

    wind, turbulence, and visibility;

    alignment with the runway or landing area;

    aircraft attitude and energy management;

    judgment about whether to continue or abort.

The famous saying among pilots is that a good landing is the result of a good approach. The final seconds get the attention, but the real skill is managing the aircraft so that the final seconds are almost inevitable.

For test pilots and astronauts, this was even more true. A spacecraft returning from orbit is not simply "coming down"; it is a carefully managed high-speed reentry followed by a sequence of events where errors can become unrecoverable. Armstrong’s background as a naval aviator and test pilot probably shaped his view: the ability to bring a machine safely back to earth is the ultimate demonstration that you and the machine are working together.

There is an interesting parallel with sailing: anyone can enjoy being carried along on a boat, but a sailor’s reputation is often made when bringing the boat into harbor in difficult conditions. The departure is the adventure; the arrival is the proof of competence.

Exactly. Parallel parking is a wonderfully small-scale version of the same idea.

Driving straight down a road is not much of a demonstration of skill. But parallel parking compresses several judgments into a short sequence: estimating space, controlling speed, understanding the geometry of the vehicle, coordinating steering and mirrors, and making small corrections at the right time.

The interesting thing is that once someone has truly learned it, it stops feeling like a series of calculations. The driver develops a sense of where the car is — an internal model of the vehicle’s position and movement. That is very much like what a pilot develops: not just knowing the instruments, but having a feel for the machine.

And there is a similar distinction between a merely successful outcome and a skilled one. Someone can eventually get a car into a parking space by repeated adjustments, just as someone can get an airplane onto a runway. But the expert does it smoothly, with the minimum necessary corrections, because the judgment happened before the final maneuver.

A pilot might say: "The landing begins miles before touchdown." A good parallel parker might say: "The parking job begins before you start backing up." The hard part is setting up the conditions so the final movement is almost automatic.

Ah, a certain similarity with doing long division.

That is a good comparison, though in a different domain. The similarity is in the transition from conscious procedure to practiced skill.

When you first learn long division, every step requires attention: write the quotient digit, multiply, subtract, bring down the next digit, check whether the estimate was too high. It feels like a long chain of separate operations. With practice, the process becomes almost a single mental pattern. You still do the steps, but they are bundled together.

Parallel parking and flying have the same feature: the expert is not necessarily doing less thinking, but the thinking has moved to a higher level. A novice thinks:

    "Turn the wheel now. How much? Check the mirror. Am I too close?"

An experienced driver thinks more like:

    "The angle is right; the car is going in."

A mathematician doing long division does not consciously narrate every subtraction either. The basic operations have become tools available for a larger task.

There is also an interesting difference: long division is mostly a static, symbolic skill. The numbers do not move while you are working on them. Flying and parking are dynamic skills — the situation changes while you are deciding. That makes timing and prediction much more important.

But the underlying principle is the same: practice turns a sequence of individual acts into a coordinated ability. That is why experts often have trouble explaining what they do; parts of the knowledge have become embodied rather than verbal. The old phrase "know-how" versus "know-that" captures it nicely.

I flew into Seattle one time when it seems there was some big ball game happening, and the skies were full of planes.  The pilot came over the loudspeaker and said we were going to have to go down the middle of all these circling planes, and it was gonna be steep, but relax.  Then down we went.  I most remember the swarthy guy sitting next to me breaking into a horrible odor.  The passengers applauded once we were down.

That is a very good illustration of the difference between what is technically routine for the pilot and what feels dramatic from the passenger seat.

Seattle–Tacoma (Sea-Tac) can get especially busy, and on days with a major sporting event there can be a lot of traffic arriving and departing. What you experienced was probably a situation where air traffic control had aircraft sequenced tightly, with planes being vectored into the approach path. To a passenger looking out the window, it can seem like you are threading a needle through a swarm; to the cockpit crew it is a carefully managed flow.

The captain's announcement was actually a nice piece of passenger psychology. Saying, in effect, "we know this looks unusual, but this is controlled" prevents people from interpreting the steep descent as a problem. A commercial jet can make surprisingly steep-looking approaches when needed, especially when managed within operating limits.

And the applause after landing is a classic passenger reaction. A smooth landing after something that looked frightening feels like a performance. The funny thing is that the pilots probably regarded it as a normal day's work — just another approach, another landing.

Your seatmate's contribution is also a reminder that fear has very physical effects. Some passengers get anxious, some grip the armrests, some go silent, and some... produce their own environmental event. Humans are wonderfully complicated passengers.

It ties right back to Armstrong's remark: the passengers were celebrating that they were safely out of the situation; the pilot was probably taking satisfaction in having flown the approach correctly. Two very different perspectives on the same landing.