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Old September 28th 09, 05:28 PM posted to rec.aviation.piloting
Panic
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Default ILS approach to near minimums - Video

That crab "correction" was the hardest thing to get used to when I flew the
B-52H back in the early 60s. We had a little chart near the rudder control
knob to enter the angle and velocity of the crosswind, then we pulled up on
the knob and cranked it to the chart value to hydraulically move the main
gear so that it would be aligned with the runway even though we landed still
in a crab. We could crank up to 20° of alignment correction.

All of my previous years, once we finally saw the runway at very low
altitude we'd kick out the crab and use wing low cross control for landing.
GCA minimums were 100' ceiling. You had to psyche yourself ahead of time to
insure that when you finally spotted the runway you'd leave the crab in and
land that way. (but...make sure you entered the crab correction in the
right direction)


"BeechSundowner" wrote in message
...
On Sep 26, 8:46 pm, a wrote:
On Sep 26, 11:10 am, " wrote:


I noticed when you broke out at 500 feet agl you aligned the axis of
the airplane with the runway then tended to drift a little left, and
coordinated turned yourself onto the center line again. Absolutely
nothing wrong with that, but my habit is a little different. I
continue to fly the localizer at whatever crab angle I need to keep
the needle centered and when much lower drop the windward wing, kick
the airplane into alignment and transition to a cross wind landing.
It would be interesting for the thread to address the advantanges and
disadvantages of each method.


A,

While IMC, I do exactly what you say, fly the crab all the way down.
Problem and why you see me drift left when I break out was I was 1/2
dot off fthe localizer to the right, so in order to find the
centerline, it required a slight turn to the left when I broke out 512
MSL or 200 AGL.

You can see my "reintercept" of the centerline from 7:20 to to 7:30 by
watching the point of the cowling in relationship to the runway
centerline. During this 10 seconds, I was correcting the right of the
localizer problem.

Couple of thoughts, as I did not even realize until breaking out that
I had that much of a crab as I was so focused on maintaining the
localizer. . It took several adjustments of the header bug on descent
to find that sweet spot in tracking. When I broke out, needless to
say I was surprised at my crab angle (like, oh crap, where's the
runway!), and thus the sharp "response on the yoke" My subsequent
approaches were not that abrupt on the yoke as I was better prepared.

This was a quartering "downwind landing" 34L was closed so only 16L
was available.

It's fun to Monday QB my videos and I sincerely appreciate this kind
of feedback!