Stalls, and turning.

[turboplanner]

They were your students, why didn't you just get their entries and circuit procedures up to a safe standard?

 

 

[Billzilla]

They were your students, why didn't you just get their entries and circuit procedures up to a safe standard?

Why would you assume I didn't?

 

I have found that quite often the student would learn better by making the occasional safe mistake. So I'd let them do a tight circuit entry, point it out, then they would recognise it the next time they went to a new airport.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Then if you corrected them this isn't an issue and we can all fly conventional safe circuits without people falling out of the sky.

 

 

[Phil Perry]

A FWIW on the topic of joining the circuit at an unfamiliar runway - I have taught a fair few people to fly and I can't remember a time where when entering downwind at a new runway the student pilot hasn't been much closer to the runway than at a familiar airport. I don't know why, but everyone did it.My point being that being closer to the runway on downwind means it's more difficult to roll-out onto final without going to larger bank angles, etc.

We had problem with this in the early days at our brand new Microlight airfield Bill, the land owners on both the North AND South sides of the site moaned like hell to the Council authorities when our aircraft overflew thir land; so we had to formulate a VERY tight circuit, which made things correspondingly difficult for the Instructors AND visiting pilots. Due to these "Geo-constraints" we had to use a "Racetrack" pattern for the circuit, which didn't go down too well sometimes when our students carried out a cross country excercise to a site with "Normal" squareplan circuits and much more airspace to carry it out in, The school were getting lots of complaints from irate airfield operators about our blokes doing circuits around the boundary fence etc. . because this was how they did it where they were taught !

 

Fortunately, this resolved itself after we had been in residence for two years, when someone else bought all the land to the South of the field, and was also a flying enthusiast. We still have a serious NO-Fly zone to the North, but have much larger circuits available now, all to the South, with three RH and three LH circuits, which can be flown neatly without any pilot having to use severe angles of bank to stay within unsuitable geographical limits. We now have a tidy, standard overhead join procedure for all runways, albeit scaled down to 1000 ft in the O/H and a circuit height of 500ft aal. This keeps the instructors, students, local residents AND visiting aviators happy.

 

Phil