The Thumb Method for Holding - Flight Training Vdieo

this free flight training tip is brought to you by forth flight the leading producer of aviation apps for the iPhone and the iPad check them out at 4:00 flight comm what we're going over is how to visualize the correct holding pattern entry using your thumb and your heading indicator now there are two times when this is going to come in handy for you and one is when you need to confirm that the entry you've previously decided on is actually the correct entry remember an IFR flying one of the things that keeps you safe is the redundancy so anytime you can build redundancy into your procedures the better off you'll be it's like the scientific method everything you discover is a hypothesis until you can prove that it's true so the thumb method using your thumb over your heading indicator will give you a way to prove that some hypothesis about a holding pattern entry is true and another time you use it is when you need to know immediately if you haven't figured it out and you're falling behind the airplane and you arrive at the fix this will give you a quick way to figure out which direction you're going to turn and then work to confirm that what you figure out here is actually correct so let's take a look at how it works for left hand patterns you're going to use your left thumb so let's just see this we put a thumb up over the heading indicator and once the thumb is there you're going to draw a line from up in to the left down and to the right and the line should begin approximately 15 to 20 degrees above the 90 degree point on the left side so the nine o'clock position about 15 or 20 degrees above that in your mind draw a line from up and to the left down into the right and what that does is it divides the heading indicator into three sectors notice that just above your thumb is the teardrop sector and opposite your thumb is the parallel sector and underneath your thumb is the direct sector so and the same works for right hand patterns only you use your right thumb so you can see that here you would put your right thumb at the three o'clock position and this time in your mind you draw a line from up into the right down and to the left and again that divides the heading indicator into three sectors always above the thumb is a teardrop opposite the thumb is a parallel and below the thumb is direct now this is a very important point here what you're looking for is your outbound heading so find the outbound heading in the holding pattern figure out where that falls on your heading indicator and bam you know exactly which holding pattern entry to execute let's take a look at an example in this example here for the this is the ILS approach into Stockton California the route for runway 2 9 and you can see the published holding pattern here has an outbound heading of 1 1 1 degrees so let's imagine you're flying down toward that holding fix on a heading of 175 and you can see when you look at it this way with the airplane superimposed over the chart that it's going to be a parallel entry but if all you had was a heading indicator to look at and you would see that 1 1 1 falls over here in the parallel sector ok this is a right hand pattern so we're using our right thumb and that again divides the heading indicator into three sectors and our outbound heading of 1 1 1 falls there in the parallel sector so now let's try one that is not published imagine that air-traffic control says to you November 9 or 8 9 or Mike alpha hold northwest of the ABC vor on the three three zero degree radial left turns maintain 3000 feet and expect further clearance in one five minutes of course you would read that back and copy it down and using the thumb method to determine the entry its left turn so we'd use your left thumb at the nine o'clock position to divide the heading indicator into three sectors and here you can see that your outbound heading of three three zero falls squarely in the direct sector so when you get to the holding fix you would immediately begin a left turn directly into the holding pattern and that's how you use the thumb method to determine holding entries on your heading indicator

Channel: The Finer Points

Views: 240,533

Rating: 4.8951077 out of 5

Keywords: flight training video, instrument pilot, Instrument PTS, Holding Patterns, Learning to Hold, aviation podcast, the finer points, jason miller, learn to fly online

Id: YbIw6kdytnU

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2013