- Sat Nov 11, 2017 3:16 pm
#400963
The critical thing is to use an approach that goes upwind of the landing spot.
From there, you can fly either a rectangle, cuttting corners if too low, extending legs if too high, or a circular-ish approach, tightening the turn if too low, rolling out if too high.
A straight in approach with figure 8s doesn't work all that well at the Crestline LZ, for example, because the place where you would be doing figure 8s is often quite lifty. So what happens is you wind up blocking the approach for awhile, as you do what looks to the casual observer like trying to soar the training hill. Even flying a rectangular pattern, I had one day where I gained enough on the downwind leg that I had to go back out and try again from a lower altitude. Three times.
A straight in approach from downwind of the LZ that hits more sink and/or more wind than you expected can wind up landing short.
If there's someplace a rectangular pattern doesn't work well, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
From there, you can fly either a rectangle, cuttting corners if too low, extending legs if too high, or a circular-ish approach, tightening the turn if too low, rolling out if too high.
A straight in approach with figure 8s doesn't work all that well at the Crestline LZ, for example, because the place where you would be doing figure 8s is often quite lifty. So what happens is you wind up blocking the approach for awhile, as you do what looks to the casual observer like trying to soar the training hill. Even flying a rectangular pattern, I had one day where I gained enough on the downwind leg that I had to go back out and try again from a lower altitude. Three times.
A straight in approach from downwind of the LZ that hits more sink and/or more wind than you expected can wind up landing short.
If there's someplace a rectangular pattern doesn't work well, I'd be interested in hearing about it.