On Approach

Overhead or direct?

Matt Dearden

I might be imagining it, but the skies feel a little busier than I remember them from past summers… Perhaps it’s because after all the months locked down, we are all into the ‘you only live once mindset’ and want to take advantage of any free time we have now before it’s too late. Or maybe it’s because we can’t travel abroad, we are enjoying home turf more. Either way, it is great to see! However, with all that extra traffic flying around the chances of an airprox are high, especially when departing or arriving at an airfield, and I can’t help but feel that the overhead join can cause more issues than it prevents when it comes to airproxes.

The principle is pretty sound. Fly overhead the runway from any direction 1,000ft above the circuit height, making a note of which direction the circuit traffic is turning in, and start turning in that same direction (or not, depending on which direction you’ve arrived from) to position yourself on the opposite side of the runway to the circuit traffic, the dead side. Then turn a bit more in the same direction and start descending to ensure you get down to the circuit height while still on the dead side. Turn a bit more to cross over to the live side and join the circuit at the start of the downwind leg. Then fly straight for a bit before turning a bit more to land.

All this while getting your aircraft set up for the impending landing. Also, don’t forget to keep an eye out and listen in on the radio to make sure you don’t bump into anyone else while thinking in three dimensions, as other aircraft might also be descending. Spotting other aircraft while turning is tricky, especially when you throw in the high- / low-wing conflict. They could already be in the circuit – or joining it – having just taken off, or even worse joining from the overhead at the same time as you just did. If that happens, hopefully your aircraft is faster than theirs so you can get in front and not have to keep wondering where they got to. Unless they do tighter circuits than you, in which case you should probably keep looking out for them. In fact, do that anyway until you’re on the ground, just to be safe.

Of course if you’re flying with passengers they’ll definitely appreciate the extended views of the airfield you’re about to land on, from the left or right side windows, depending on which direction you’ve elected to turn in, and won’t be wondering why on Earth they are having to endure another few minutes of your flying skills as the air becomes bumpier and bumpier the closer to landing you get.

Save embarrassment… be prepared before you’re overhead

Hopefully you are turning the same way as everyone else in the circuit, otherwise it’s a bit of a palava to re-orientate both your aircraft and mind to be the correct way around. Unless you are correct and it’s the other aircraft that have got it wrong. Save embarrassment, and be mentally prepared before you’re overhead. There is another way to join a circuit pattern, which I much prefer, and that’s the direct join. This doesn’t involve aircraft all flying to the exact same point above an airfield like the overhead join but instead, you just join the circuit on the appropriate leg at circuit height. No need to get yourself dead side and descend while turning, no need to worry about aircraft at different levels to you. Just slot yourself into the circuit on crosswind, downwind or base and your landing is only moments away. Even better, if you happen to be coming from the same direction as the final approach course, you can join the final approach course and land!

OK, there are a few downsides. You do need to have an awareness of what’s happening in the circuit before you arrive, especially if it’s busy, but I would counter that by suggesting that a busy circuit is perhaps not the best place to be congregating above with anyone else wanting to join while you figure out what’s happening below. Perhaps better to keep away for a bit until you’ve sussed out how you’re going to slot into the melee. Oh, and remember to make sure you turn in the direction as the circuit pattern, as with the overhead join, but at least you only really have to keep an eye on the aircraft you are joining behind rather than wondering what the other aircraft in the overhead are doing.

You’ve only got to look at how IFR traffic is vectored for arrivals to know which way is better and safer. They do direct joins albeit radar vectored. It avoids having aircraft crossing over each other at different altitudes and keeps the flow of traffic efficient. The only time you get IFR traffic on top of each other is in a holding pattern. It would be much harder to try and vector aircraft around an overhead join. By vectoring each aircraft around a standard circuit, each aircraft doesn’t have to do lots of extra turns before landing and there aren’t any conflicts. Unlike in the overhead of a VFR airfield on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Bees around a honeypot anyone?

Currently dividing his time between a Cub, a Catalina… oh, and a PC-12

matt.dearden@seager.aero

Full Throttle

Sense of the past

Mark Hales

A good mate has recently started a new enterprise entitled The Great British Car Journey, a simple piece of genius which celebrates the ordinary cars our parents – and grandparents – owned and cherished. His museum, housed in a long hall once home to a rope factory, celebrates the lives and fortunes of the UK’s great automotive pioneers – Herbert Austin, William Morris, William and Reginald Rootes – all surrounded by examples of their less glamorous products. And if you thought that was easy to arrange, there are for instance, only four 1.2 litre Vauxhall Chevettes still registered with DVLA. They and their counterparts represented utility and once they had lost their initial lustre, they rotted away pretty quickly. Richard’s idea is more than just a museum though. ‘Drive dad’s car…’ means you can drive an Austin Seven, a Hillman Imp or a Morris Minor, and many others.

It’s a great idea, but the experience can’t be exactly the same as it was because roads have changed and traffic travels so much faster. And if you got the chance to live with ‘dad’s car’ for a few days rather than drive it round a small track, you’d wonder why the wipers were so rubbish, not to mention the heating, demisting, absence of aircon, lack of brakes, and whining axles.

Industrial progress has resolved so much in our everyday transport, and that is before we even get to remote central locking and Bluetooth connections… Looking at all the stuff on an ordinary modern car, we should wonder how they are so cheap.

Yet aeroplanes in general, and ‘The Light Aeroplane’ in particular, have not benefitted from a similar level of development. So even if the certified ones that most of us fly date from the same era as much of Richard’s collection, they seem perfectly normal today. You probably wouldn’t use a Morris Minor as daily transport but there would be no problem with a Cessna of similar age, provided it had a decent radio... Perhaps more importantly, the air hasn’t changed like the roads. Busier and increasingly regulated, but there are still large swathes where from 1,500ft, it looks much as it did when the aircraft was made.

It’s the immediate sense of the past that makes ‘Old Aeroplanes’ extra special. The cockpit of my Messenger is much like it was in the 1940s, but it still rides the air exactly like it did. The feel of the controls is the same, the in-line clatter from the Blackburn’s exhaust just below my feet is still as loud. I’m transported body and soul, back to 1946… All of this is made real by the log books which are such an important part of an aircraft’s maintenance, but which also say where it’s been and who was at the controls. The yellowing pages of Civil Aviation form 26 – otherwise known as a Journey Log Book – shows an entry by Arthur Linnell, the Messenger’s first owner, leaving Sywell on July 12 1947 with two passengers, bound first for Lympne, presumably to clear customs, landing at 1125. They left at 1155 and reached Deauville at 1330. Then, two days later they flew to Le Touquet, then to Zoutelaand in Holland, which appears later as a regular destination, every landing with a Customs stamp and signature. None of this very interesting per se, but fascinating as a part of the aeroplane’s life. Who knows why they went or for what, but it was in my aeroplane.

It’s that immediate sense of the past that makes ‘Old Aeroplanes’ extra special

Messenger is nothing if not well-travelled. There was almost a daily trip to France in the 1950s, then further afield to Munich and Cologne, and of course the beach landing to give rides at Skegness for which I have a photograph. That looks distinctly local though, compared with the log for the Fairchild Argus/ Forwarder which I found some years ago, hanging from the roof in Midden Zeeland. It had started life as a lend-lease aircraft and had flown the hour and a half’s acceptance flight, but then nothing further until it was shipped back to the Fairchild factory where for some reason it was given a new Fairchild Ranger engine, then in 1946, dismantled and crated, shipped to Cairo and reassembled, wearing the South African registration ZS-BAY. A ‘Mrs Forward’ (appropriate name) then flew the 5,000-plus miles single-handed, to Johannesburg. Some of the places recorded in the yellowing pages you couldn’t visit now, but even if the politics were less of a problem then, there must have been challenges of a different kind. Khartoum to Nairobi to Dar-es-Salaam… How did she plan, how did she navigate? How did she know there would be fuel? Some of the legs were six or eight hours, so goodness knows what size of ferry tank she had or more to the point, how did she keep a Ranger 6-440 in oil for that long? That is one of the type’s little foibles which it took some time to make only slightly better. But I also know that then as now, the Fairchild would have been a friendly companion for Mrs Forward and if she’d had to put it down, then it would have floated on like some giant Stork settling on long stalky legs designed to cope with the roughest of fields. And 50 years on, I was able to sit where she sat, looking at the same knobs and switches, feeling the same controls, which like the Messenger, are linked by rods and bellcranks rather than cables and pulleys. You can’t put a price on any of that.

Working vintage aircraft and cars make Mark particularly happy

mark.hales@seager.aero