This would be extreamly useful for formation flights as well as fighters and GA that do not have great forward visibility. Right now I just ask for a straight in entry, and then say going around on short final.
YouTube clip for those who are not familiar with the overhead:
Took me a minute to understand this but yea, I can see this in infinite flight.
Great idea!
This is a great suggestion, I was writing a new post about this when I saw your’s pop up as a suggestion. The overhead is a fun way to fly an approach and it gives tower some different options on traffic mitigation. I’d really like to see this!
How would you like it announced? Request for fly over pattern entry?
I managed to do this recently on PG KSAN, i was cleared for landing on 09 by tower while i was on a cesna and a faster aircraft behind me was cleared 2nd. So i decided to give way and called a go around, so i flew above like this and the aircraft landed, it was a pretty unique view.
It would be a pattern entry instruction just like enter straight in or enter right/left traffic… I think it would be pretty cool to announce something like “San Clemente tower, Vega31 is 17 nautical miles to the east at 8,000 feet, inbound for landing, requesting the overhead for runway 23”
I like it I usually do this with transition now but that would be sweet
The way we do it in the military is “Tower, Rhody_01 request over head 34 right break.” Tower then would come back with cleared for “” @ 1,000 ft. (altitude is obviously subjective to what they want)
These developers like to do incremental improvements so I was just thinking get it in there, but I like your idea a lot more. That would be so cool to have a version of ATC communications tailored specifically for military aircraft only. After all it is better to die than to sound bad on the radio
Whatever makes it easy for the developers and accessible to the most users. Regardless it would be nice to mix up the approaches a bit. Nice video in your original post btw.
Well like when I fly small prop planes in real life, we may be straight in for the runway; however, we may go to the right of the airport to enter a midfield for a left downwind. So this feature would make it more realistic.
MaxSez: in my experience the Run & Brake (Overhead Pattern) is primerally a military high performence (Fighter Section/Sqd) maneuver. It’s performed by a group of high performence (primerally fighter aircraft and not by GA routinely)
In my opinion it is not suitable at this stage of IF development or pilots proficiency levels. Additionally to performe this maneuver a significant amount of time, coordination and practice to develop this skill set is required.
(Call it what you will, The vid appeared to be a standard pattern)
Overhead joins are useful, I fly them all the time at my local airfield (Shoreham EGKA, UK) where base leg joins or overhead joins are the default entry options.
With regards to the ATC phrasing, the normal instructions sound like this:
“N123AB join overhead 2000ft (or pattern altitude +1000ft), descend dead side, report when on downwind”.
It can be a little confusing at first, but when in clicks and you understand it, it’s easy and gives good visibility if the pattern is busy.
Is this suppose to separate traffic?
It can be used to help separate traffic, yes.
It takes longer to come in, descend dead side and turn on to crosswind and then downwind than say a direct downwind or base leg join.
It also gives a little more time to descend to the desired altitude, is it correct?
Correct! As you are higher up and above that pattern altitude, you can visually locate any nearby traffic and act accordingly such as slow down or widen the dead side curve.
Edit: Video below showing the procedure. The first 2 minutes show the “join”.
Well said. Thanks for sharing the video. :)
I’d like to bump this up, can’t believe it hasn’t got any votes, you have my vote, it’s such a useful tool to have.
They could say “enter overhead for left downwind runway whatever” or something