Lukla landing challenge

    • Official Post

    Easy: Land the F18 in Lukla runway 06.

    Hard: Land the F18 in Lukla on runway 24.

    Some screenshots of my first successful attempt, wind was about 3kt on the runway.

    1) highest rate of energy loss in a deep stall, glide ratio is still too good to descent with the mountain range. About 90 knots at this point.

    2) violent deep stall deflections to get the trajectory pointed back down. Still 90 knots but due to the high angle speed is increasing again. Oh no.

    :

    3) speed back up for a little more elevator control authority, hard stall coming up to lose that gained speed

    4) create massive amounts of entropy

    5) Nose back down, speed now up to 120ish, enough for the flare... just put it down

    6) Hard flare to arrest the insane sinkrate of 4000ft/min

    7) using all of the landing gear... kinda hard landing with over 1500ft/min (woops) - the slope takes away at least 700ft/min... hurts a lot but aircraft usable again. Brakes already pressed full.

    8 ) max braking using up elevator to push the aircraft onto the runway (increases load on tail wheels and thus increases braking action)

    9) Clean the dirt off the wheels and and change the pants

    10) Take off again?


    You know that you made it if you can taxi to the ramp.

  • Also possible with the cessna... still very hard because it gains speed downhill even with full flaps, so you have to retract them just prior to the flare to decrease the lift and increase stall speed to set it down... otherwise you float to the end.

    Selecting flaps up.

    braking action increases as flaps go up too.


    Finally some grip!