We continue to see many preventable landing accidents. No group of pilots nor class of airplane seems to be immune from this kind of mishap. The airplanes involved in these accidents range from the smallest amateur built airplane to the unfortunate recent crash of the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 at San Francisco. The pilot experience ranges from newly certificated pilots to airline captains with many thousands of hours. But many of these landing accidents have one thing in common - an unstabilized approach. Everybody probably remembers a flight instructor saying that a good approach leads to a good landing. If a pilot is chasing the airspeed, struggling to get lined up with the runway, or trying to correct for being significantly too high or too low, the landing is probably not going to be pretty - or worse. But just saying that we need to make a "good approach" isn't really much help unless we can define what we mean by that. Over the past twenty or so years, we have quantified what we mean and renamed it the "stabilized approach." The concept has been in wide use by professional pilots for many years but is not always embraced by pilots of small airplanes. The concept of the stabilized approach applies to both VFR and IFR operations. A general aviation adaptation of the stabilized approach might consist of seven elements. An eighth element simply states that if any one of the first seven is not being met, the approach is not stabilized and must be abandoned.

The pilot needs to become familiar with the elements of the stabilized approach. This list is not intended to be used as a checklist during the busy approach phase. The first seven elements should be committed to memory so that a mental bell will sound when one or more of the items is amiss.