Yep, finally a nice thread 🙂 and an interesting one 🙂 (there are others too)
Just ask, and i and the others who have some real life experience will for sure love to share our feedbacks.
Although what i can say procedure wise, may at some times differ from what is done in the military (as my buddy Dee-Jay pointed out), but i will make sure i stay related to what is applicable for the F-16 … based on my limited knowledge about it.
But the advice about putting the gear down once you are on glide slope was more an advice to target how much more easier it is to fly the airplane at that point.
Simply because when you put the gear down and the flaps come down, the airplane will loose some airspeed, which you can regain without adding to much power by catching the glide slope with a pitch down attitude, this will minimize the playing around with power settings and attitude settings.
I always like to take advantage of some of the “natural” behaviours of the plane to actually reduce my workload.
@ Dee-Jay: here in Canada we don’t really put the gear down once on glide slope for noise abatement reduction purposes.
Canadian civilian pilot training is one of the best in the world because it is mainly derived from the military. We use sometimes the same books for studying and there are a lot of same ways of doing stuff. To the point where the Canadian civilian CPL is a real advantage for someone seeking a pilot job in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
We have Noise abatement reduction procedures for each airport when we do fly IFR, but the gear down on glide-slope is not part of it, the noise abatement procedures that we need to conform too, are mostly and almost exclusively related to departures with SID’s … but we have some for landing, but the one for landing do not concern power management due to aerodynamic configuration change, but rather an approach angle or a minimum altitude.
But true, in the future i will make sure that my IFR references are pertinent to the ops for F-16. 🙂
