Touch-and-Go vs Full-Stop Landing

The touch-and-go (T&G) is the foundational repetition technique of primary flight training. In a T&G operation, the student lands, immediately applies full power, reconfigures the aircraft (typically retracting flaps from landing setting to takeoff setting, confirming trim, and applying carb heat OFF if applicable), and commences the takeoff roll without leaving the runway surface. The goal is to maximize the number of approach-and-landing repetitions per flight hour — a one-hour pattern session at a busy training airport can produce eight to twelve T&G cycles versus a single cycle on a one-hour cross-country flight. For primary students building approach and landing proficiency, this efficiency is valuable. For fleet operators, it has significant maintenance implications.

A full-stop landing is a touchdown followed by braking to a complete stop, exiting the active runway, and either taxiing back for a subsequent takeoff or returning to the ramp. For currency and experience logging purposes, a full-stop landing produces a complete landing count against the regulatory recency requirements.

The FAA currency rules under 14 CFR §61.57 draw a critical distinction between T&G and full-stop landings for specific recency requirements. Section 61.57(a) — daytime passenger-carrying recency — requires three takeoffs and three landings within the preceding 90 days but does not specify full-stop; T&G landings satisfy the day recency requirement. Section 61.57(b) — night passenger-carrying recency — requires three takeoffs to a full stop and three landings to a full stop within the preceding 90 days from 1 hour after sunset to 1 hour before sunrise. The full-stop requirement at night is deliberate and explicit: T&G landings at night do not satisfy §61.57(b). The rationale is that night T&G operations omit the situational awareness opportunity of taxiing back in low-visibility conditions and do not practice the complete night ground-operation sequence relevant to safety.

Section 61.57(c) — instrument currency, the IPC or instrument approach currency for IMC flight — does not specify full-stop landings; it requires six instrument approaches, holding, and intercepting/tracking courses within 6 calendar months, but the approaches may be in a flight simulator, in actual IMC, or under the hood in VMC, and the landing itself is not the operative recency event.

A stop-and-go is a variant where the aircraft lands, stops completely (full-stop by definition), and immediately begins a takeoff roll without taxiing off the runway. A stop-and-go satisfies the full-stop requirement under §61.57(b) — the aircraft did stop — but at a controlled airport requires an explicit ATC clearance for the immediate takeoff from the stop-and-go position, because ATC must confirm no other traffic is cleared onto the runway before the pilot recommences the takeoff roll.

For glider operations, 14 CFR §61.57(f) specifies three solo flights rather than landings within the preceding 90 days — the landing-count concept is displaced by the solo-flight-count concept given glider operational patterns.

The maintenance implications of T&G operations are significant and frequently underestimated in training fleet management. Each T&G produces one landing cycle on the airframe — one gear-strut compression, one tire wear event, one brake application. The gear mechanism, tire, and brake are the highest-consumption wear items on training aircraft, and their replacement intervals are driven by landing cycles rather than flight hours. A Cessna 172 main gear bungee or spring assembly wear, nose-gear shimmy-damper service, and brake pad replacement are all functions of landing cycle accumulation. A training aircraft accumulating 500 flight hours per year in a T&G-heavy profile may accumulate 3,000–4,000 landing cycles — the same cycle count that a 500-hour cross-country aircraft would take four to eight years to reach. Maintenance programs calibrated against a low-cycle operating profile will silently under-serve a high-cycle training aircraft.

For turbine training fleets, the cycle premium is more consequential because life-limited parts (landing gear components with manufacturer cycle limits, thrust reverser actuation systems with cycle-based inspection intervals) can reach limits well ahead of hour-based TBO thresholds, as explored in the Cycles entry. Schools that do not separately track landing cycles from flight hours will miss these maintenance triggers.

The night full-stop currency requirement under §61.57(b) is one of the most frequently violated currency rules at flight schools that primarily train in daytime or under visual rules. A student who completes a night solo requirements flight, then does not fly at night again for three months, will arrive for their first post-solo night dual lesson technically unable to carry passengers at night — which matters if the instructor expects the student to conduct a passenger-accompanied night solo (a non-standard but occasionally attempted arrangement). More commonly, the currency issue arises when a certificated private pilot who has not flown at night recently wants to take a passenger on a night flight: the three-night-full-stop requirement must have been met within 90 days, and T&G sessions do not count toward this requirement.

For flight schools, ensuring that students complete their night currency in full-stop format — and documenting it correctly in both the training record and the student's logbook — is a compliance responsibility. A student who logs three night T&Gs and believes they are night-current for passenger carrying is logging incorrectly, and the error will surface in a worst-case scenario at an accident investigation or enforcement action.

Aviatize's training management module records each landing as either touch-and-go, stop-and-go, or full-stop, with day/night distinction applied automatically from the sunset/sunrise times for the training airport's coordinates on the flight date. Currency calculations in the compliance and auditing module apply the correct definition to each requirement: the 90-day day passenger recency accepts all landing types; the 90-day night passenger recency counts only full-stop landings conducted between 1 hour after sunset and 1 hour before sunrise. Students and instructors can view their current currency status on any date, with clear expiry warnings before the 90-day window closes.

For fleet maintenance planning, Aviatize tracks landing cycles per aircraft separately from flight hours, with each landing event — including each T&G — incrementing the cycle counter. This allows the maintenance control module to schedule gear, brake, and tire inspections against the actual cycle accumulation rather than a proxy based on hours, and to flag when a high-cycle training aircraft is approaching a cycle-based maintenance threshold that would not be visible on the hours-only maintenance timeline.