I've managed this on several occasions with a ducted fan powered glider with about a 2 metre wingspan. Our flying field is fairly high up and has quite laminar wind flow patterns if the wind is coming from the right direction and is fast enough. It's perfectly possible to have the thing land completely vertically from several hundred feet up, while maintaining an ordinary level flight angle. It looks almost impossible, the plane simple sinks gently down until it touches the ground.

It's a very good example of the difference between ground speed and air speed. The plane is, of course, doing some 25-30 miles per hour relative to the air, so is flying completely normally, but the air is doing exactly the same speed in the opposite direction relative to the ground so the plane just hangs there in much the same way bricks don't

pca