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Old 21st Oct 2001, 21:08
  #19 (permalink)  
fireflybob
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: UK
Posts: 3,984
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I am glad to see that my original post has created some debate!

I am an advocate of the Point & Power technique for flying the approach and, despite my "handle", I am from a civilian background having flown many light types up to the B737 and A320!

For circa 8 years of my airline career I was a TRE/IRE (Sim) Instructor. I remember well conducting one of our pilot's first recurrent base checks in the sim. I was trying to work out why the "candidate" was making a meal out of flying the ILS. On the coffee break it suddenly dawned on me that he was using the pitch for airspeed and power for rate of descent system for flying approach. A quick debrief and suggestion that he tried it the other way round produced instant results (for the better!). He also confessed that for the past six months he had been finding it hard to fly the approach and was relieved to discover there was an easier way of doing so.

I have been doing a little research on this subject and received an email recently from an ex CFS instructor who was instrumental in getting CFS to change to Point & Power. On a routine visit to a UAS on a very windy day the students were having difficulty flying the approach and were making horrendous changes of attitude to control the speed. He consulted with his colleague and they decided to teach the students Point & Power. The result? Immediate and instant improvement. They also reckoned that teaching Point & Power reduced time to solo by one to two hours!!
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