Spend enough time at a non-towered airport, as I have, and you’ll eventually see every traffic-pattern variation you thought possible. Traffic patterns at towered facilities, of course, are subject to ATC management. The controller’s job is to sequence and separate traffic on the runway(s). In the absence of local controllers, non-towered airports use the traffic-pattern procedures first drummed into primary students during landing practice.
But it often seems that knowledge somehow is lost once the student graduates from training; rated pilots seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to deviating from standard traffic patterns. To a seasoned observer, it can be hard to determine if a well-defined traffic pattern even exists at some airports. My observations tell me the pattern diagram below may be one of the few things pilots retain from their training; everything else seems to have been lost, like a paper sectional after a door pops open. So it’s time to review traffic pattern operations.
