Fine, then pilots should demand appropriate, effective, and recurrent circling training.
Never a truer word. In Australia there are airline pilots who are have difficulty conducting a normal circuit in perfect conditions. Judging the base and turn on to final when hand flying is apparently a tricky situation to them. In order to be stable by definition they prefer to always be radar vectored (if available) to final.
Not only that but some operators in OZ require their pilots to have landing flap selected late on the downwind leg where a circuit is being carried out, because the pilots are so apprehensive of being unstable on final that the company SOP now requires them to be stable for landing
before turning base with all landing checks complete. Any fuel savings made in the cruise are shot. Vref plus additives downwind means the aircraft is being flown slower than some general aviation aircraft.
One cannot blame the pilots since by regulation they are required to follow company SOP. Presumably there must have been a few QAR reports of last minute unstable approaches from circuits so the chiefs fix that by making it SOP to be stable for landing while on late downwind. A bird strike in an engine at that point (landing flap down in level flight) would require some fancy footwork. Bet that is not practiced in the simulator..
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