Holding Pattern Entries Made Easy

Learn which holding pattern entry to use in each situation. This plain and simple video will make your next holding pattern entry a breeze!

Hi, and welcome to MzeroA’s video podcast, Episode number 11, Holding Pattern Entries Made Easy. I’m your host, Jason Schappert. Today, we’ll go over a direct, tear-drop and parallel entry and how to properly decipher which entry to use in which situation. Let’s go ahead and watch the video.

The best place to start with visualizing our holding patterns starts with the heading indicator. Let’s imagine receiving this radio call.

Cessna 512 Romeo, hold southwest of the Ocala VOR on the 210 radial. Maintain 6,000, expect further clearance in 20 minutes.

First, let’s visualize our VOR in the center of our heading indicator and draw a line from 210 to the VOR. This shows our inbound course. From here, we can visualize our right hand racetrack pattern. Note that we add the arrows to show us making turns to the right. This shows a direct entry. On a heading of north, we fly directly to the VOR and start by making our right hand turns to enter our hold.

Now let’s look at another type of entry. Imagine if you received this radio call.

Cessna 512 Romeo, hold northeast of the Ocala VOR on the 030 radial. Maintain 6,000. Expect further clearance in 20 minutes.

So again, we start by drawing our VOR in the center of our heading indicator and drawing a line from 030 to the VOR showing our inbound course. With this, we can now visualize our right-hand racetrack pattern drawing our arrows in. On a heading of north, we would make a tear-drop entry flying directly to the VOR, outbound for one minute, before making a right turn back around to intercept our inbound course staying in the protected area.

Let’s take a look at our last entry.

Cessna 512 Romeo, hold northwest of the Ocala VOR on the 330 radial. Maintain 6000 expect further clearance in 20 minutes.

So like the previous times, we start by drawing our VOR in the center of our heading indicator. From there, we draw a straight line from 330 to our VOR to see our inbound course and draw our holding pattern making standard right-hand turns. From this we can see we make a parallel entry on a heading of north directly to the VOR, outbound for one minute, and making a big left turn back around to intercept our inbound course on our VOR and then enter the hold.

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