2 Minute Holds: AKA a Circle.

[ARFlyer]

Got a chance to fly with my IR student today doing partial panel and holds. I noticed the winds today are pretty wicked coming out of the south.

Anyway my student was getting frustrated at himself, as he couldn't get his inbound legs to 1 minute. After working his way down to a 10 second outbound, I finally told him just stay in the turn until back inbound.

I found myself laughing my butt off as he tried to understand why our holding pattern was a circle. I wish I had the track log.

 

[MAKG1]

Well, you could have had him hold south of the fix instead of north, and it might have been more obvious.

 

[AggieMike88]

track Log: start using Cloud Ahoy. For CFI's there is a feature to put a pin on a time stamp and enter a short note. Then when you use the debrief feature, you will see the pin and your note.

I am using it more and more for my flying now that I am IFR and it's a good tool to help review where I did good and where I can improve.

 

[midlifeflyer]

Anyway my student was getting frustrated at himself, as he couldn't get his inbound legs to 1 minute.

The more important lesson for your student is to understand holds, holding airspace and their purposes more generally, so he won't get frustrated over wind conditions that make a perfect racetrack pattern virtually impossible.

 

[Gucci Pilot]

So the winds were wicked, and he was having trouble getting 1 minute inbound, yet your patterns still came out looking like a circle? I'm confused...

 

[luvflyin]

Well, you could have had him hold south of the fix instead of north, and it might have been more obvious.

Yeah. Doing it both north and south would have been the perfect explanation. Then east and west. He'd be able to hold in his sleep after mastering that.

 

[SCCutler]

Just have him do a few holds on an NDB with the ADF.

 

[luvflyin]

So the winds were wicked, and he was having trouble getting 1 minute inbound, yet your patterns still came out looking like a circle? I'm confused...

I think the point was that in order to fly the "race track" he was hardly ever straight and level on the outbound leg. The ground track wouldn't be a circle but it would "feel" like you were flying a circle, then straight ahead for a minute, then another circle

 

[ARFlyer]

So the winds were wicked, and he was having trouble getting 1 minute inbound, yet your patterns still came out looking like a circle? I'm confused...

I think the point was that in order to fly the "race track" he was hardly ever straight and level on the outbound leg. The ground track wouldn't be a circle but it would "feel" like you were flying a circle, then straight ahead for a minute, then another circle

Basically you never roll out of you outbound turn until you back inbound. So it would look like hemisphere, more or less. But to him he felt like he was turning in a circle the whole time.

Yeah. Doing it both north and south would have been the perfect explanation. Then east and west. He'd be able to hold in his sleep after mastering that.

We also did that to show him that sometimes you have really long outbounds to adjust for the wind. I tried the East and West but it was starting to get to him because he kept drifting off the inbound to much for his taste. We'll come back to that on the next lesson.