Estimating descent angle from carry, apex and flight time

Descent angle (also called landing angle) is how steeply your ball is falling the instant it lands — and ContactCoach traces it from your carry distance and apex height whenever your launch monitor doesn't measure it directly.

Why does descent angle matter?

Picture two identical wedge shots landing on the same firm green from the same spot. One comes in at 50° — almost straight down — and checks up right where it lands. The other comes in at 38°, a flatter, more glancing angle, and skips several yards past its own pitch mark before it stops. Same club, same carry, completely different result on the green — and descent angle is the number that tells you which one you're going to get. It's one of the few numbers that connects what your launch monitor sees in the air to what actually happens the moment the ball hits the ground, which is exactly why it's worth knowing even though most consumer monitors never hand it to you.

How does ContactCoach figure it out?

Here's the twist: a golf shot isn't a symmetric rainbow where the ball comes down the same way it went up. Drag and lift keep working on the ball the whole flight, bleeding off forward speed, which drags the peak of the arc past the halfway point of the carry — typically to around 70% of the way there, not 50%. It's a bit like a ball with a lot of backspin: it climbs longer than it falls.

Once you know the ball spends the first 70% of its carry climbing and only the last 30% coming down, that final descending stretch behaves like a simple, predictable curve. Say your monitor reports 150 yards of carry and a 96-foot apex — about as tall as a 9-story building. ContactCoach only needs those two numbers, plus that 70% rule of thumb, to trace how the last leg of that arc bends toward the ground and back out the angle it's falling at when it touches down.

This isn't a full physics simulation tracking drag and spin frame by frame — it's a shortcut that turns three numbers ContactCoach already has (carry, apex height, and that 70% assumption) into a genuinely useful angle. The exact formula is in the box below if you want to see it.

heightYds  = apexFeet / 3
descentRun = carry * (1 - 0.7)                  // the final 30% of carry
descent    = atan2(2 * heightYds, descentRun)    // radians, converted to degrees

How accurate is the estimate?

This is an estimate, not a measurement. A dual-radar Trackman (roughly $14,000 and up) tracks the ball's entire flight on radar and reads landing angle straight off that; ContactCoach is reverse-engineering the same number from carry and apex alone. Checked against published TrackMan tour-average landing angles across the club set, it lands within about ±3° of the real thing. That's plenty to tell you whether a wedge is coming in steep or shallow, and to compare clubs against each other in the same session — but don't expect it to match a radar-measured landing angle shot-for-shot. Trust the pattern across a club's shots in a session more than you trust any single number.

Whenever your launch monitor does export a measured landing angle, ContactCoach uses that value instead and labels it "measured," not "estimated" — the estimate is a fallback, never a replacement for the real reading.

Which monitors give you this for free — and which measure it directly?

Any monitor that exports carry, apex height, and flight time gives ContactCoach everything it needs to estimate descent angle — that includes the $599 Garmin Approach R10, which doesn't export a measured landing angle on its own.

Descent angle is measured natively by Trackman-class dual-radar systems (roughly $14,000 and up), which track the ball's entire flight path and report landing angle directly. FlightScope's Mevo+ measures it too, but only after the paid Pro Package unlock — the base Mevo+ export doesn't include it.

Try it

Upload your own CSV at / to see estimated (or measured) descent angle per shot and per club, or click "Explore a sample session" on that page to see the estimate in action without uploading anything. If your monitor also reports club path and face angle, pair this with the face-to-path guide to see the full shot-shape picture.