An article which certainly makes you think! The most important thought in the article is:
Lastly, no arbitrary approach criteria for general aviation will remedy deficient pilot skillsQuote
To me, my approach is stable, if my mind is 5 seconds ahead of the airplane at all times, and that 5 second ahead viewpoint looks good. If you’re only flying one type of approach in a single engine fixed wing GA plane, and following the numbers to do it, you’re cheating yourself. There will be at the very least two different necessary approaches for that type, probably more. One probably involves the use of power, the other with no power. A cross wind approach may be different than a calm approach.
Flying consistently “on the numbers” is not a fix all to assure good landings, pilot skill and currency on type is…
What he writes there is not really new, is it? Other than that, it is long-winded, and mostly a play of words, IMHO.
Very long but:
For general aviation, go around criteria are the real issue, not a stable final approach.
Amen to that ! Ever since the talk about stabilized approach started, I have never really found exactly what it is supposed to be in a GA aircraft. There is simply too many changing variables, too many different strips and so on. The only thing I have come up with is some vague form of a “planned” approach. Being ahead of the plane and adequately skilled sounds like a much better idea 
Then what’s left is to focus on a go around when/if things happens too fast, or something unexpected pops up. The thing is tough, IMO it is close to impossible to train for this other than on several different fields, preferably short and narrow ones. The go around “instinct” has to sit in the back bone.
It’s a good article. There are still too many in GA who have been taught to fly a long stable final approach – because that is taught in the PPL, especially in Europe. It is also less safe because it gets flown too slowly; often too close to stall. Make a go around more difficult too. Better to fly to final a lot faster and learn to slow own at a late stage.
There is also this in “Threads possibly related to this one” below.
Peter wrote:
because that is taught in the PPL, especially in Europe.
The instructor I had, which I appreciate more and more as the decades pass, lamented this as well. While acknowledging the “stabilized approach” – which is what we want airline and bomber pilots to do – he taught to assume an engine failure in the pattern, and know what you will do. Many airports in Europe have “fixed” patterns, so you can’t just fly closer to the runway. You have to maintain enough speed and altitude to glide to the runway or at least a safe place. Or at least not land on unsuspecting people on the ground.
eurogaguest1980 wrote:
he taught to assume an engine failure in the pattern, and know what you will do.
While I agree that the airline-style stabilised approach is usually not appropriate for light GA, I don’t see the sense in this. Of all the places and times you can get an engine failure, why focus on the traffic circuit? Landing accidents are much much more likely than engine failures.
You should set up the traffic circuit to maximise the likelihood of a safe landing which means that you should turn onto final approach with a speed and altitude that allows you to arrive over the threshold with the proper speed without having to resort to unusual measures. (What’s unusual depends on the aircraft of course – on a Cessna 172 style aircraft I would say that sideslipping on final approach is highly unusual while on flapless aircraft it is standard procedure.)
Unstable (Final) Approaches – History, Fiction, and Fact
Hm, lots of buzzy wording and strolling around the points. Yes, nice to use as a recap, but as-is a starting point of discussions, not an end. What I always felt, when the issue came up, was a lack of stringent definition and documented circumstance for the discussion. Experience from ‘PPL training’ is vastly different depending on flight school and mindsets have to be aligned prior to discussion as well as brought into a common frame of reference.
Some flight schools tend to teach ‘PPL for ATPL’ and for those a ‘stable approach’ is mandatory prerequisite for airline safety, as it means the aircraft will in principle land by itself almost no matter what the pilot f*cks up. Some other flight schools teach more ‘John Wayne flying’, where aircraft are beaten to the ground occasionally, no matter how configured and i.e. sometimes even ignoring things like trim altogether. In between is all the light and shadow one can imagine, indeed.
For myself I treat the ‘stable’ vs ‘unstable’ discussion more like ‘natural’ vs ‘guided’ landings. If you configure your aircraft to ‘naturally’ land, it is by default ‘stable’ meaning it will require little skills from the pilot, which is what the airlines need for cheap push-button-monkeys operating expensive equipment loaded with self-loading freight. No offence, just to emphasise. The less ‘natural’ you configure the aircraft the more guidance it needs from the pilots skill&luck bucket, up to the point were only brut force gets it on the ground.
GA tends to claim more space off the ‘guidance’-land, public opinion just the opposite and I am sure, the best future is somewhere in between. One action I’d like to see though is more awareness of GA specifics in public opinion and the death of current overprotection tendencies … ;-).
Landing an airplane can easily be defined as something requiring “expert skills”, excellently explained here!
4 things are needed:
I mean, landing is what 50% of learning to fly is all about, and it’s repeated until it sticks. Once the license is firmly placed in the wallet, then timely feedback (in the form of a second pilot) goes out the door, for GA pilots. To some degree also deliberate practice. For airliners this is not the case. They are two pilots, they give each other feedback and land so often that they are for all practical purposes practicing. Airliners also have a much more narrow set of parameters. The airports they land on are all the same (the same parameters, for all practical purposes, with very few exceptions).
For airline pilots the (valid) environment is much more precisely defined, and much more narrowly defined. They have many repetitions, timely feedback and lots of practice (deliberate or not). They have the luxury of adding more procedural stuff that may or may not make a difference, as for instance the concept of a stable approach.
For us, the environment is equally valid, but much more varied. Valid here means the performance is less affected by random chance. At least if you fly a bit out of the beaten track (other places, other countries, different kind of airports and fields). We have the opportunity to become better in this respect, a broader experience, by orders of magnitude if we want. Many repetitions is proportional to hours flown, and may be lacking. Timely feedback is certainly lacking, but can be improved a lot. Setting measurable goals; touch down at a particular spot, taking videos of the landing and so on. Participating in landing competitions is also a way. That way we also get deliberate practice. Otherwise the only feedback will be a good landing is a landing you can walk away from Which is relevant and timely feedback, but utterly useless if you want to improve what you have defined as a bad landing
I don’t know. I have more trust in science than self proclaimed “experts”. Science says there is no substitute for currency (a minimum hours each year), deliberate practice (study and read about aviation and make each landing “count”), which also will give us feedback. This is what’s lacking. But then again we are private GA pilots, we do this for fun. Fly as much as you can, and remember to (and practice to do) the go around when things feels wrong, and you will survive every landing is my take on this. Let airline pilots be airline pilots. Unless they also are active GA pilots (fly small planes for fun in the spare time), then be vary of what they say. The author of the article seems to tick all the boxes.
I would agree with the author that it is practically meaningless in what configuration/state my C172 is at 1000 ft above the threshold, when those 1000 ft are plenty enough to adapt might flight path to what’s necessary to arrive at a safe speed, height, course and descend rate over the runway.
Also, as he says, down below it often gets much more gusty than at 1000 ft, so an approach that was “stable” may require much more pilot input at 200 ft than it did at 1000 ft without the pilot doing anything wrong. Indeed if you view this as grounds to abort or go around, you might never land in some days which are otherwise perfectly flyable.
