A trio of landing videos for your enjoyment / criticism :) As per usual, 720p and full-screen makes it cooler ;)



This one was at KRDU, Raleigh-Durham. They switched runways on us twice while we were on final, and we ended up aiming at runway 05, 5 miles back at 5,000'. A normal glideslope height at 5 miles would be about 1,500' above ground, so we were about 3x that, yee-haw! We were empty, so Kitsch pulled the power to idle, dropped the speed brakes and the plane took the express elevator down. The Citation 550 can descend pretty much vertically if we need to, and you might note (through the wind noise) that we actually had to add power on short final to make the approach. That's also good airmanship in our jet - the engines take a little while to spool up, so if they were at idle power and we had to go around suddenly for some reason, we might be at a bit of a disadvantage. I like to keep the power at around 55 - 60% until we are at 50' and crossing the runway threshold, just in case.



This was coming back home on a cloudy day. I forgot to turn on the camera until we had already mostly broken out, but there's about 2 minutes of ok footage, and I didn't completely pooch the landing so there's that too ;) Not too challenging overall as the winds were light, and theceiling was 1,000' (we can get down to 200' without having to look outside) but it was still kinda fun. About 2:10 into the video you'll see a big cloud-generating building in the distance. You might wonder why they have a cloud-generating building so close to the runways - I did, and then found out that it's the power plant for the airport. I guess they need it nearby, but on foggy days it can really add to the overall overcast.




This last one is landing on runway 23 at Pearson, also known as the opposite end of runway 05. We did this one a few days ago, on a smoggy, hot, thunderstormy day. The ceiling was 9,000' but as you can see, the smog made for some pretty poor visibility. The approach was fairly routine, but they kept us in pretty close so we got to turn and drop like a stone during the last couple of minutes. Always fun for the flight crew, sometimes less fun for the passengers. The thing that concerns me the most is thinking about the fact that I breathe that same polluted air.