Gary,

 

Lately I have chosen to do curved arc descents to landing from the downwind (i.e. no squared pattern) at my towered airport. Nobody has complained and I find it easier to control both the descent rate and speed in a constant banked turn (assuming I guessed the wind effect properly) and a minor fix is less dramatic than in those 90 degree pattern turns as its need can be recognized earlier.  Oh well, fly it the way you like.......

 

Scott Krueger

 

There was an interesting comment posted the other day that 
essentially said that a turn to final won't result in an accelerated 
stall because the aircraft is descending and therefore has a load 
factor of less than 1 G.  Of course, as long as the aircraft isn't 
accelerating vertically the situation is the same as for level flight 
- the load factor will be greater than 1 G.  But what if one did 
decide to turn the 90-degree turn while keeping the load factor at 1 
G?  Certainly any turn at any bank angle can be made at 1 G as long 
as the aircraft is allowed to accelerate downward.  How much, I 
asked, so I went to my trusty spreadsheet and did some calculations.  
If you turn 90 degrees at a bank angle of 15 degrees (load factor of 
1.0 instead of the normal 1.04) and an airspeed of about 90 knots you 
will exit the turn at a vertical descent rate of 1,000 ft/min MORE 
than when you entered.  Do it at a bank angle of 30 degrees and the 
number is about 2,000 ft/min.  at first it seemed to me that it is 
unlikely that doing this type of thing makes sense, although I 
suppose one could go from a base leg at level flight and use the turn 
to make the transition to descending flight.  A 1,000 to 2,000 ft/min 
descent rate isn't far off for a normal final approach, so maybe it 
would be a reasonable thing to do as normal practice.  Just a thought.

Gary Casey
ES #157

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