The circle-to-land maneuver at the conclusion of an instrument approach has earned a reputation over the years as one of the riskier things we can do in an airplane, to the extent many major carriers don’t allow their pilots to perform it—they want stabilized, “straight-in” or nothing. The good news is that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the accident record is heavily salted with such accidents.
The even-better news is that the proliferation of RNAV GPS-based approaches has resulted in straight-in procedures to both ends of a typical runway, all but eliminating the need to circle. The desire to circle is another thing, however, and is still with us. It most often crops up when we’re arriving from the wrong direction and, for whatever good or bad reasons, don’t want to fly all the way to the other side of the airport to shoot an opposite-direction approach to the sole runway at our destination just because of a little wind at the surface.
