Welcome Guest. Sign in or Signup

3 Answers

Wind correction angle during high wind holding.

Asked by: 9011 views Commercial Pilot, FAA Regulations, Flight Instructor, General Aviation, Instrument Rating

What is the best way to calculate or correct for wind during holding in a high wind condition?

Is there any rule of thumb or formula ?

 

Steve.

Ace Any FAA Written Test!
Actual FAA Questions / Free Lifetime Updates
The best explanations in the business
Fast, efficient study.
Pass Your Checkride With Confidence!
FAA Practical Test prep that reflects actual checkrides.
Any checkride: Airplane, Helicopter, Glider, etc.
Written and maintained by actual pilot examiners and master CFIs.
The World's Most Trusted eLogbook
Be Organized, Current, Professional, and Safe.
Highly customizable - for student pilots through pros.
Free Transition Service for users of other eLogs.
Our sincere thanks to pilots such as yourself who support AskACFI while helping themselves by using the awesome PC, Mac, iPhone/iPad, and Android aviation apps of our sponsors.

3 Answers



  1. John D Collins on May 15, 2016

    There maybe a rule of thumb, but the outbound wind correction must lie between using a wind correction angle between 2 and 3 times the wind correction used on the inbound leg.

    Using a value of 2.5 and rolling out of the turn to intercept the inbound leg with a 45 degree intercept is what I do.

    Assume the wind is a direct crosswind blowing the aircraft towards the oval and the outbound leg. Tracking the inbound leg produces a wind correction angle of a. Tracking the inbound course compensates for the drift of X in distance in one minute. Assuming the rest of the hold is uncorrected during the two turns, the outbound turn and the inbound turn take roughly 2 minutes to accomplish and during that time the aircraft will drift away from the inbound course by a distance of 2X. So on the outbound leg, you need to compensate for the outbound leg drift which is X (the same as the inbound amount) and also compensate for the drift of the two turns. So distance wise, the outbound leg has to compensate for 3X. Three times the distance does not precisely equate to three times the angle. But the drift is related to the crosswind angle by the tan of the angle. So one could describe an equation that the angle b to be used on the outbound leg has a tan value equal to three times that of the tan of angle a. For a 20 degree crosswind angle, the outbound would be 47 degrees, or a multiple of 2.4. For a 15 degree crosswind correction angle, the outbound leg would use 39 degrees, or 2.6 times the angle in the opposite direction. A ten degree crosswind angle would use 2.8 or 28 degrees.

    +3 Votes Thumb up 4 Votes Thumb down 1 Votes

  2. Best Answer


    Mark Kolber on May 16, 2016

    John, You did a great job describing the 2-3 times the inbound correction for the outbound rule of thumb and explaining its source.

    A question: what do you use for guesstimating the =first= outbound in high wind conditions? IOW, you are going to hold south on the 180° radial. You are arriving from the west, so you are going to make a direct entry. In no-wind, you simply fly a 180° heading. But if we have, say, a strong easterly wind that will blow you toward the inbound course, potentially putting you on the non-holding side when you turn inbound, what do you use to guestimate the correction when you don’t already have an inbound correction as a reference?

    +2 Votes Thumb up 2 Votes Thumb down 0 Votes



  3. RGWv on Jul 04, 2017

    First I fly straight for 15 seconds before turning outbound. I know approx. the wind speed so I apply 2.5 times (60*wind speed/TAS).

    0 Votes Thumb up 0 Votes Thumb down 0 Votes


The following terms have been auto-detected the question above and any answers or discussion provided. Click on a term to see its definition from the Dauntless Aviation JargonBuster Glossary.

Answer Question

Our sincere thanks to all who contribute constructively to this forum in answering flight training questions. If you are a flight instructor or represent a flight school / FBO offering flight instruction, you are welcome to include links to your site and related contact information as it pertains to offering local flight instruction in a specific geographic area. Additionally, direct links to FAA and related official government sources of information are welcome. However we thank you for your understanding that links to other sites or text that may be construed as explicit or implicit advertising of other business, sites, or goods/services are not permitted even if such links nominally are relevant to the question asked.