Originally Posted by
gogoflying
Recently I struggled with a standard OHJ. I'm fairly inexperienced having only qualified this year,
Actually, you are now a little more experienced than you might think. This kind of thing happens all over the place, and on some airfields more than others.
As Piperboy points out, you can in fact, be both right and dead. It matters not who is right, but who is left.
I hesitate to say that we have all been where you were, but I doubt that it is rare. The very practical Standard Overhead Join, like it or not, (and I like it) is the published procedure in most places, and not always followed. What I dislike about the diagram, is that it assumes Left Hand Circuit and approaching from a suitable direction to fit in.
Picture a Right Hand Circuit on an East / West runway where you approach from the North West. That involves crossing the active twice in a right hand turn before you start your descent. Recovering to Perth from the South (Friarton Bridge) involves you staying at 2,000 QFE until you have crossed over both thresholds, and then start your descent on the deadside. One fine clear day, while doing so, I met another aircraft, head on, 100 feet below, doing an overhead join, but had got the circuit direction wrong.
One of my very few regrets in my flying has been that I failed to report this incident to the CAA. Another is turning down a back seat ride in one of the Red Arrows Synchro Pair.
We have published procedures for a reason, Some say, "we don't actually do that here, because some of the committee think it is wrong, in certain circumstances", but that is mental.
Still, we live and learn, hopefully.