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Comment by Simon_O_Rourke | Hacker News Reader

I would like to know what the Ryanair pilots are ordered to do by their higher ups. Been on a few of them in Europe and they all hit the runway pretty hard coming back down.

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That's just to shake loose any spare change you might have in your pockets. Pays for the crew's busfare.

Maybe they prefer Navy pilots? /s

An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway and you have to get the hook down.

Try KLM. Drop it down from 3' up and ensure firm contact with the runway, rather than those endless landings where nobody knows if you've touched down or not. Better to avoid the ambiguity. You have to break ground effect somehow and the decisive way is the best, then at least you know you're no longer flying but rolling.

I think GP is saying that Ryanair demands that pilots use the automation to the fullest extent, and disallows "hand flying" (with an exeption, one presumes, for when the automatic systems fail, and a hope that the pilots remember how to hand fly).

Navy pilot vs Air Force pilot.

Ryanair is not exactly recruiting from USNavy

The UK has aircraft carriers too.

But a) not Ireland b) the amount of carrier pilots is low c) The intake of new pilots in EU no longer involves a military-to-airline kind of pipeline, especially with explosion in low-cost and charter airlines

FYI: firm landings are actually correctly done, especially with rain or drizzle. It should not feel like a crash though.

The worst landing I ever had was when I landed with no sensation of touching down on the runway (a zero feet rate of descent.) Both myself and my CFI went nuts trying to figure out if we were down, or still flying along the runway and about to bounce.

Is there no contact indicator or anything?

I've never flown anything where I couldn't just look out of the window to check so I don't know but it feels like there should be :)

No there isn't.

This was at night also.

that really makes me curious.. so can you retract landing gear if you’re not airborne? is there not a sensor to prevent this?

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