Better Braking – Plane & Pilot Magazine | Aviation

I was too young to drive a car. We both had a good chuckle, then we lurched out of the parking spot as I tested the toe brakes for the first time and began to waddle our way to the runway in the mighty Cessna 150.

When thinking of ways to display your mastery of flight, most of us dream about buttery-smooth landings, or maybe maneuvers flown so precisely that the altimeter needles might as well have been just painted on. Or for the master-level courses, you might argue that sharp, aerobatic figures or handling a challenging taildragger are a good way to show your airmanship.

Robert Buck, whose books North Star Over My Shoulder and Weather Flying should be required reading yearly for pilots, pointed out that in his career, which spanned from World War II to retiring as a 747 captain, he could usually size up a fellow pilot’s abilities before they even got airborne. How they came to a stop holding short of the runway generally gave a preview as to how they would handle a plane for the rest of the flight. If they came to a stop using constant brake pressure, the plane would come to a stop with a bit of a lurch, bobbing the nose up and down as the…