How do pilots calculate their rate of descent so that they’re at ground level when the reach the runway?
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Lots of good answers about instrument approaches, but I want to highlight the mark 1 eyeball. After all, even an instrument approach is finished off with a visual segment for touchdown.
Let me ask you a question: when you drive a car, how do you know exactly how much braking you need to stop by a certain point?
The answer I assume you’ll give me is that once you have a bit of experience driving, it actually becomes very natural to just look outside and be able to judge how much you need to put your foot down. Yeah maybe check your speed a couple of times, and you might need to adjust how much brake pressure you’ve used. But almost all of the time you can bring it to a nice comfortable stop at the point you intended.
Well for pilots it’s the same thing. If the weather is good they’re looking outside at the runway and can easily judge if their approach path is too high or too low. They don’t need to do any calculations by this point of the approach, and certainly aren’t just chasing a particular rate of descent. They need to be making whatever adjustments are needed to stay on the ideal approach path. But once they have completed training, this is easy to do [for most pilots…](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214)
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