Apologies for length. Learning to land an aircraft (without damaging it) is perhaps the most difficult part of flying. In the sense of difficult it's also hard. A difficult landing, meaning one that is challenging, can also end up being a soft landing - if the pilot is skilled enough and maybe a little lucky. If you feel that the plane really went bump on touchdown, maybe even broke something, then that is indeed a hard landing, but as an ex glider pilot, private pilot and a native English speaker I'd call that a heavy landing. May not seem right to others, but I was familiar with this phrase before being exposed to the aviation community so don't think it's just jargon. The common usage is seen for example in this: Ryanair Extreme Heavy Landing - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZDTviYUP5M I do note that commercial airline manufacturers have tried to designate hard and heavy landings as different in quite a logical way - hard being eg. >2G and heavy being an overweight aircraft - but that is not the idiomatic way that in my view the language is generally used.