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Beach Landings...again

SnowMan

Registered User
Khobar, Saudi Arabia
I saw a few posts about landing Cubs on beaches that said the plane will head for the water. Weird. I land on beaches a lot and have never seen that. My experience has been that the nose will always head "uphill" or away from the water, especially as the plane slows down. When the uphill portion of the beach is on the left and there is an offshore breeze it can be darn near impossible to keep the plane from heading up the beach. I saw my dad put a J-3 (C-90) on its nose in those conditions.

If you were taking off under exact opposite conditions (bank on the right and onshore breeze) I guess you might have the tendancy to head "out to sea" but I don't recall experiencing that....not with fairly steep beaches anyway.

Does that make sense or do I have a Cub that's afraid of water....hmmm, does okay on floats, though.
 
I've found that on beaches or sloped landing sites that the center of gravity, since it is aft of the main wheels, will always pull the tail downhill ( no wind ). What has worked for me is to make your approach and landing with up to a 20 degree or so correction toward the downhill side..........then as the cg pulls the tail that direction it is easier to align with the ground track you want.
 
Snowman,

Cubdriver has it, and the physics involved as well. On a slope the nose tends to go uphill, tail downhill. So, an offshore wind (wind blowing from land) is the worst case scenario. Best case scenario is no wind, but if you gotta have a wind, an onshore wind tends to counteract the tendency of the tail to go downhill.

Pretty simple if you think about it.

MTV
 
Snowman,
The fella that told you that, most likely never landed on a beach, or the one time he tryed
To, he wound up headen for the water, so came up with that story. Your observations are
Completely correct, alot of 180/185s that have had the gearbox tore out of them ,on a beach, happened from that classic offshure wind landing like your
Dad showed you. Stick with what you already know works, and dont pay much attention to guys like him ( wanta bees)...
 
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