After turning from base to final, a pilot should be able to quickly and correctly determine whether to continue or discontinue the approach to landing by judging salient visual clues. What clues? The runway sight picture, glide path, descent rate, runway heading, airspeed and altitude are the primary ones we should be using. Pilots need to recognize these clues in real time for what they are to gauge the approach’s stability.
A stabilized landing approach, of course, is one in which the pilot establishes and maintains a constant-angle glide path toward a predetermined point on the landing runway. Why is the stabilized landing approach concept so important? In 2000, a task force assembled by the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), an international nonprofit concerned with aviation safety, “found that unstabilized approaches (i.e., approaches conducted either low/slow or high/fast) were a causal factor in 66 percent of 76 approach-and-landing accidents and serious incidents worldwide in 1984 through 1997.” The FSF’s focus is on commercial operation of turbine-powered transports, so the rate likely is higher among non-commercial operators, like you and me.
