"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
One of the cool things about WAAS is the ability to fly a synthetic
glideslope on a non-precision approach. I'd much rather follow a
needle smoothly down to MDA than dive-and-drive through a couple of
stepdowns, even if the MDA is still the same 500 AGL or whatever.

Problem with a smooth descent is that when you arrive at the sectors MDA,
you have immediately start down again rather than taking a few moments to
sift things out. Stable approaches were build for the heavy metal/turbine
crowd.

http://www.avweb.com/news/columns/182091-1.html
Pelican's Perch #24:
Sloppy, Sorry VNAV

Flying a non-precision approach has traditionally been a "Dive and Drive"
affair in which the pilot descends rapidly to the MDA or step-down altitude
and then levels off. Recently, however, pilots of aircraft equipped with
glass cockpit FMS systems or VNAV-capable GPS receivers have been encouraged
to fly such approaches using a constant descent path. There's even a
buzzword for this: CANPA (constant-angle non-precision approach), and these
calculated pseudo-glideslopes are now starting to show up on Jeppesen
approach plates. AVweb's John Deakin thinks this is a bad idea, one that
will result in a lot more missed approaches and perhaps even some accidents.
Deakin explains why, and makes a compelling case for flying non-precision
approaches the traditional, old-fashioned way that God and Cap'n Jepp
intended.

----------------------------------------------