I pretty much fly everything, anywhere, within certain boundaries of what the airplane i’m flying can actually do… i fly everything by hand.
Doing the ils approaches teaches you usually that the glidepath is about 700-800 fpm descent, doing it by eye it nothing short but difficult, to me at least. But, with practice, you get to eye the runway a bit better.
First of all, where i start, is looking up the airport elevation upon approach (as i fly all over the place, i usually have no clue about the airport i’m heading to, so i do some “groundwork” in finding the airport elevation and the desired runway magnetic heading… i input that one into my headingbug, as i’m approaching the airport i either get the visual or the digital and line it up with the headingbug… as i looked up the elevation of the field, i add up to 1000 feet for GA aircraft, and upto 2000 to 2200 feet for bigger aircraft. Since i’m not running a big enough graphicscard to see “that” far in airliners, i tend to try and find a view that i like in the aircraft window, and when the papi’s, available on most airfields, come into play i follow them in until i’m about 300 feet from the runway threshold, i then aim for the numbers on the runway, cut the throttles whilst over the threshold and pull up over the numbers gently whilst diverting my view towards the end of the runway and wait for the airframe to settle down onto it’s wheels.. this has worked for me in almost every plane, until the radial engines of some ww2 era warplanes came about, with them it’s nescessary to fly the given airspeed and gently give it less and less throttle until they settle down… which usually means taking up aLOT more runway than other airplanes.
Hope it helps.
Happy Flying, Captains!
Regards,
Steiny