Quote:
Originally Posted by E_Dawg  ...why?? This is where you can use what you know and put it to work for the comfort of the passengers and for the benefit of your workload. And it's just plain safer to follow a needle down than it is to keep chopping and dropping to a new altitude every few miles. |
Absolutely agree. There's a reason that precision approaches are vastly preferable to nonprecision--they get you established in a stabilized descent (at a slower descent rate) much more readily than a non-precision approach.
The *only* reason I see for using stepdowns is if you're flying a big old jet and a smaller aircraft is getting vectored in to follow you at the published GSIA, it would be considerate to use the stepdown altitudes so they can at least try to avoid your wake on the FAF. We deal with this all the time coming in on the downwind for 24R at LAX when there are a bunch of arrivals from the Civet or Seavu tracking the glideslope down--it's not a big deal VFR (most of the time), but in IMC it sucks to be following a heavy with no real way to avoid going through the wake.