How to Fly the Kodiak 100 | Part 11: Approach and landing

In this tutorial, we look at the particular techniques required to land the Kodiak 100.

There are several different landings shown, including one via a descent and pattern entry, a failed landing, and the bad things that happen when you get too low and slow and a balked landing.

One of the key aspects is correct and careful power management - at full flaps a torque setting of ~1000ft-lbs will be required to maintain an approach speed.

Note that throughout the tutorial reference is made to 'landing speed' this should be taken to mean Vref, or the speed at which you should cross the threshold. During the flare and hold-off, the throttle should be fully retarded and the speed at which you land should be just above Vso or stall speed. This will happen naturally if you arrived at the correct speed. If too fast, you may bounce or land heavy. Too slow and you may stall onto the runway with a heavy landing despite the slow speed.

Personally, I find it hard to hold a constant or target speed in the Kodiak on approach - this is one area of the model that I think needs more work by SWS as its clearly not so hard in the real aircraft to pitch and trim for a particular airspeed and then hold that. They have however done a great job modeling the drag from the prop: 'like hitting a wall'.

Note also on the input viewer you may see that there is still power indicated - that's because I have the throttle axis set to manage the beta range also and the input viewer is simply showing the position of the axis. You never engage beta in the air - it is for ground use only.

IF IN DOUBT - GO AROUND!

Crosswind and short-field landings will be considered in separate tutorials.

And you will see I made the fairly major error of landing on the wrong runway! I decided to leave this embarrassment in as it underscores the importance of not getting distracted (ie thinking about what next to say for a video you are recording!) and also the danger of habit: I'd spent about an hour flying circuits from 20R just before recording that segment and so landing on 20R was what my brain was expecting. So distraction + habit = error. This is why all approaches and landings should be briefed and briefed again.

00:00 Introduction
01:28 Max landing weight
02:09 Landing field required
04:29 Wind limits
04:48 Landing speeds
07:48 Landing field orientation
10:36 4 key things about landing the Kodiak
19:30 Entering the pattern
22:05 Turing to downwind
24:52 Base
26:05 Final
29:24 Landing 20L
32:54 Failed landing
35:53 Balked landing
36:49 Stable approach

[zuuplaai]

I love these videos! Missionary bush pilot and this channel are the way to go, to learn about the kodiak! Keep it up!

[HunSnakestyle]

Its a good video, but you should use the "headphone mode" when you recording, so the engine noise would be not that strong which is very disturbing, as english is not my first language I had to turn on subtitles :D ...but still, its a very good video :)

[khrdina]

I'm glad you put up that brief text about not landing on 20R, as I was momentarily very confused!

Thank you for the detailed descriptions and the multiple examples.

[CheeseyCHV]

Thank you for your videos, they are very helpful! If I may make one request, your voice is way too quiet, in comparison to the aircraft sounds. You have basically to inverse the loudness relations. There is so much important information in your videos, it would be a shame to miss something, because of the loud aircraft sounds.

[Choff]

Loving this series of videos, hands down the best and most complete Kodiak Tutorial on YouTube. I've learned to fly the Kodiak on FS with you. I was waiting anxiously for the landing part 😂 Maybe you could turn up the volume a bit on your voice, in this video specifically it kind of blended in with the engine sound. Keep up the good work!

[JNJONSON]

I tried to watch it to learn the landing but I have very sensitive ears when it comes to certain sounds. I couldn’t hear what you were trying to convey here. Thanks for trying though. I’m having trouble landing this thing.

[chucksadler]

Excellent video! If you don’t maintain 1000 ft lb torque with full flaps, you will literally fall out of the sky. This is not realistically modeled. It is also impossible to maintain slow level flight(70ish knots) with flaps extended.

[ianwilliams]

This is definitely the weakest part of the flight model.. approaches are such a pain in this aircraft.. August 2024 and still no fixes for this. so unfortunate... the amount of hype this aircraft got by reviewers on YouTube I think they were basically paid for it.

[floatinflyinandfishing]

As much as I love the kodiak, i dont fly it anymore. SMS NEVER had the approach dialed in...on your first approach take a look at the ball...as soon as you were under 90 you were totally uncoordinated and skidding...this comes from their left turn tendency fetish. the p factor for this model has never been right, add to that the weird autopilot trimming that is in the entire game and you have a cluster fuck every time you try and land the kodiak. they wanted so bad to capture the left turn of the pt-6 that they screwed the entire model up...and now they have abandoned it and made no improvements in about a year