"Michael" wrote in message
om...
"Steven Barnes" wrote
I did a night circle to land with my instructor about a month ago
(vfr,
under the hood). I can honestly say, I didn't like it. Learned alot,
though.
He had always talked about how dangerous it can be and after doing
one, even
if it was only simulated, was a big eye opener. Things just look all
kinds
of wrong. :-)

Tell me, did you like power-on stalls the first time you did them?
Spins? Canyon turns? Landing on very short obstructed strips?

In my opinion, circling maneuvers are not unacceptably dangerous, but
to a greater extent than normal flying they are quite unforgiving of
poor technique. In other words, there is more opportunity to screw up
and less opportunity to correct the screwups. Some people choose not
to do them, and this is their right - but it does reduce the utility
of the rating.

Like any other maneuver, this one can be taught. It's not something
that can be taught on paper - it requires a combination of ground and
flight training. The airlines don't do it.

The reason airlines don't do it is simple - when they moved all their
training to simulators rather than the real airplane - which, despite
anything they tell you, was for reasons of cost more than anything -
they eliminated from their operation anything that could not
effectively be trained in a sim of that era. Sims of that era did not
provide adequate visual and somatic cues for training in circling
approaches.

So I guess my bottom line is this - with proper training, the maneuver
will go from looking very wrong to just looking demanding. I hate to
say your training was improper, but tell me this:

Did you discuss how to select a runway and a circling pattern in
advance?
Did you discuss go-ahead points - meaning a point beyond which even if
you saw the runway you couldn't effectively land on it?
Did you discuss how instrument and visual references are combined to
accomplish the maneuver?

Just as a benchmark, I consider 45 minutes of ground training about
the minimum before going up for the first circling approach - and that
assumes the student has already read the regs and understands about
categories of aircraft, circling vs. straight-in mins, allowable
distance from the runway, etc. It's 45 minutes of just discussing how
to perform the maneuver.

Michael

Once I finally got the hang of centering the ball (sorta) power on stalls
didn't scare me as much. I let a wing drop quite a bit in a 172 in early
stall training. Scared me good. Now it's not as bad. Doing them in our
club's 182 was interesting...

We hadn't really planned on doing circle approaches that day. The airport
we went to only has one VOR approach, and the wind happend to require a
circle (funny how that one night he actually made me land instead of
miss...).

"All kinds of wrong" = not what I'm used to. Nice 1000' foot patterns.
Made me fly an entire pattern at an altitude I'm only used to being at when
I'm base turning final. Not wrong, I realize. Just different. I can see how
if you haven't planned ahead & have some good situational awareness about
the pattern, you can get in the wrong place very quickly.