Palmpilot
Touchdown! Greaser!
Years ago, approach control cleared me for a visual approach from about 5000 AGL when I was more or less overhead Camarillo Airport (CMA). Since it was at night and the airport was in a valley with whose boundaries I was not intimately familiar, I felt the safest thing to do would be to spiral down overhead the field. This was after the control tower closed for the night, so I had to call to cancel IFR after landing. When I did so, the controller had a problem with how I flew the approach, so I explained the safety reasons for doing what I did. It was pointed out, either by him or by forum participants or both, that if I'm planning to do something unexpected, I should let the controller know.
That certainly sounds reasonable enough, but the question that still lingers in my mind (and which I didn't think to ask at the time) is how do I know whether my planned route on a visual approach is unexpected? Is there a normal type of flight path that ATC expects on visual approaches? In this situation, would they be expecting me to just make the downwind, base, and final legs long enough to lose the 5,000 feet that way?
That certainly sounds reasonable enough, but the question that still lingers in my mind (and which I didn't think to ask at the time) is how do I know whether my planned route on a visual approach is unexpected? Is there a normal type of flight path that ATC expects on visual approaches? In this situation, would they be expecting me to just make the downwind, base, and final legs long enough to lose the 5,000 feet that way?