Aaron's Holding SimulatorHolding is a skill that's half science and half art. I'm an engineer and a musician, so I can appreciate both science and art, but my technical side yearned for a better understanding of the ways in which airspeed, wind speed, outbound time, and wind correction angles interact to produce a holding pattern. I created a spreadsheet that allowed me to visualize that. You can download the spreadsheet here. I am working on an interactive version for this website, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
Just to be clear, this tool is not to be used in the airplane or for flight planning. Play with it at your desk and see how the various changes to your headings and times affect the shape of the pattern for various wind conditions. For those of you who care, I made some assumptions to simplify things, including:
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