One of the hardest parts of flying instruments is making the
transition from on-the-gauges to visual flight at the missed
approach point. Visual and instrument pilots also have
difficulty at times landing in the proper touchdown zone because
they're too fast or too slow on final. One way to make safe,
consistent landings, and to fly to tighter instrument
tolerances, is to fly a stabilized approach ... modified for the
realities of flying light airplanes. We hear the term a lot, but
it's not precisely clear what is meant by a "stabilized
approach." The strict definition of a stabilized approach is
somewhat elusive; most educational materials focus more on what
is not "stabilized" than what is. For example, the Flight Safety
Foundation's (FSF) Approach and Landing Accident Reduction
(ALAR) Briefing Note 7.1 -- Stabilzed Approach (65 KB PDF) nods
to the fact that "stabilized" means different things to
different operators, saying, An approach is stabilized only if
all the criteria in company standard operating pr