“If the Jacobson Flare was any good, it would have been invented years ago!” Well, as a matter of fact, it was!
One of the most favourite of the many comments made to me has been:
“If the Jacobson Flare was any good, it would have been invented years ago!”
Well, as a matter of fact, it was! If you are interested, here is the story:
70 years ago – A true and intriguing tale
Long before his earliest days of flying, David was intrigued by the celebrated 1955 film, The Dambusters.
RAF 617 Squadron Lancaster bombers breached the walls of the Mohne and Eder Dams in Western Germany, in May 1943.
This operation applied unique ‘bouncing bombs’ which skipped along the reservoir’s surface, like a stone. For these to be effective, the pilots needed a way to satisfy the precise and pre-determined bomb release height. This above still dark water and at night. The barometric altimeters of the day lacked sufficient accuracy, so two spotlights were mounted under each aircraft fuselage. Accordingly, at the correct height, their light beams would converge on the water’s surface. In other words, height was determined by simple triangulation. The crude bombsight also used this triangulation principle, applied towards the dam walls to confirm a longitudinal bomb release point.
60 years ago – An inspiration
During 1965, while learning to fly at 18 years of age, that highly effective use of triangulation became David’s inspiration. On closer scrutiny of the ‘Dambusters’ methods, David realised that an accurate flare fix for landing could be derived. It applied triangulation between a pilot’s eye path and a supplementary, pre-calculated longitudinal point on the runway centre-line, positioned short of the aim point. But that’s as far as it went, at that time.
40 years ago – An inspiration, revisited
Much later, in 1985, David was well-armed with 20 years’ experience on both large and small aircraft. On Saturday 13 April 1985, David and a small group of pilots, including RAAF QFIs (Qualified Flight Instructors), a private pilot and a student pilot were gathered around a white board in a briefing room at RAAF Point Cook Flying Club. Unable to fly, due to heavy rain and armed with mugs of steaming coffee, they were discussing why landings were seemingly so difficult for pilots to learn – in the first place, and on subsequent conversions – and so difficult for their instructors to teach, efficiently.
The consensus was that there had never been a consistent and universal technique that was based on anything better than an instructor’s personal opinion, their own experience and what their instructors passed down. That probably should not have been a surprise.
The Law of Primacy, well understood in educational circles, states clearly that we tend to believe, implicitly, what we are first taught on any given subject, creating almost unshakeable views. (This has been and remains the greatest hurdle: Ideas, anyone?)
The discussion that day revived David’s original inspiration from the ‘Dambusters’ triangulation idea and using this as his working concept, he began to research and develop a new approach and landing flare technique. Some ideas took shape and, later that same afternoon, when the rain stopped, together with one of the RAAF instructors, Flt Lt Barry Carpenter and Lindsay McKee PPL, David took off in Lindsay’s Beechcraft 23 Musketeer VH-DLW, to conduct some initial trials to test these first ideas.
Let’s go flying
Each pilot took turns at executing a normal landing, using a consistent aim point, namely, the upwind end of the 500ft fixed distance runway marks, at 600ft from the threshold and then, as usual, guessing when (i.e., the right height) to commence the flare. With David remaining in the right hand seat, for each landing, they all completed their first landings, while David noted the point on the runway just being ‘eclipsed’ by the airplane structure (forward edge of the glare shield, where it meets the base of the windscreen), when each pilot commenced his flare. Interestingly, this point was closely consistent for each pilot: the ‘start’ or downwind end of the same 500 ft mark. This point is 100ft short of the 600ft aim point being used.
Then they each completed another circuit and landing, while still originally aiming at the ‘top’ of that mark (600ft), but this time using the ‘bottom’ of that mark (500ft) as a flare initiation ‘cut-off’ point. That first experiment was a success – for each pilot.
Some ‘scaled up’ tests were trialed in TAA’s DC-9-30 flight simulator, shortly after and they too were immediately successful.
Here’s a schematic of the Jacobson Flare fix for the B737: Aim point 1 is located at 1000ft from the threshold and the flare cut-off point at 500ft.
After some initial research and much enthusiasm and support from CASA Examiner of Airmen Peter Bryant, who renewed David’s Grade One Flight Instructor rating on the strength of this emerging training technique, he was encouraged to publish a paper entitled ‘Where to Flare’ for the conference proceedings of the 1987 ‘Australian Aviation Symposium — Innovate or Enervate’ in Canberra. This technique later became known as The Jacobson Flare.
The rest, as they say, is history and the Jacobson Flare is now 40 years old. The author is a little older!
And the Jacobson Flare App has sold thousands of copies in 80 nations.
Wishing you many safe landings
Captain David M Jacobson FRAeS MAP
Would you care to experience that unsurpassed sense of accomplishment, derived from executing consistently beautiful landings, more often?
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