Downwind at Catalina. Very hard to visually judge the approach. In this photo I look low but am at circuit height. This was my second approach as I went around the first time being too high on final.
you should always maintain the “glideslope”
the problem in such a mountainous terrain is that on a visual approach you have no flat 0° reference screen outside in the landscape to judge your own 3° glidepath.
So it’s good to know that with an upslope runway you have the optical illusion to be high on final when you are perfectly right … and vice versa with a downhill slope.
Sure; you can get faulty visual cues. (I’ve taken the liberty to level the horizon in Jason’s pic.)
The easiest way to fly to a runway with dodgy visual cues is to look up its elevation on the chart, add say 1500ft to that, fly level at that altitude and when positioned appropriately on long final, say at 3nm, descend down to the start of the runway.
Peter wrote:
The easiest way to fly to a runway with dodgy visual cues is to look up its elevation on the chart, add say 1500ft to that, fly level at that altitude and when positioned appropriately on long final, say at 3nm, descend down to the start of the runway.
Peter, with all due respect: if you try that at Catalina in anything but zero wind conditions, you’ll end up where these three guys found themselves (unless you have a very powerful a/c that can outclimb the rotor). The technique there is as I have already described: come in high, go past (above) the rotor and then land while flying uphill along the slope. And of course don’t fly full flaps, as you may have to go around. Essentially, I always treat Catalina as a go-around with an optional landing. Mind you, so far never had to to do it, but it’s not a question of ‘if’, but a question of ‘when’.
Yes, understood. My comments were to do with landing when you have misleading visual cues. If there are hazardous winds, that’s another issue. But you could have those at a flat airport, due to obstacles, etc.
Peter wrote:
But you could have those at a flat airport, due to obstacles, etc.
Yes, of course, but never to that extent. The interesting thing about Catalina is the combination of
- misleading visual cues
- upslope with a hump in it
- narrow runway
- relatively short rwy (3000ft)
- the rotor
Mind you, it’s not rocket science landing there. Just a bit different from your ‘normal’ runway.
It reminds me a bit of Koblenz (EDRK) 06.
It was very gusty and due to the terrain it was very bumpy with rotors on short final.. I decided to keep the power on and land late which was no problem as the runway was more than long enough.
Stay high and land late.. Reading the posts here makes me wonder wether I should have been a bit higher for safety. Late landing was no problems what so ever.
The tower said they had had an interesting afternoon and could not remember it being so wild.
Koblenz is on my list of places to fly to one day. The 06 approach/landing has quite a bad reputation. Will not be able to compare with Catalina Island, though.
Reminds me of Crossland Moor in Huddersfield. Uphill with a quarry on the undershoot leading to interesting winds.
That sounds like Sonnen EDPS in Bavaria. A very nice airfield, also with a quarry and one landing direction basically. The runway is extremely narrow. I’ve landed a couple of times there.
