by Jeb Burnside

The touch-and-go landing is about as ubiquitous as anything involved in flying a small fixed-wing aircraft. Pick just about any community airport on a soft summer evening and you’ll probably find someone out shooting touch and goes, either as part of structured training leading to a Private certificate, as practice or as “something to do” with an airplane. The maneuver is common and is used to maximize valuable training time—working in one landing and one takeoff for every lap around the traffic pattern without having to exit the runway and taxi back—but it’s not a substitute for either of those phases of flight. Instead, the touch and go…