The Racetrack in the Sky: Why Airplanes Fly in Circles to Wait

To a passenger glancing out the window, suddenly seeing the same lake or town pass by twice can be unsettling. The aircraft is almost certainly in a holding pattern — aviation's solution to the problem of too many airplanes and not enough room to land them right now. Weather at the destination, a runway change, a traffic backup, or a problem on the ground can all force an aircraft to wait, and a holding pattern is how it waits without wandering or conflicting with anyone else. A standard holding pattern is a flattened oval, or racetrack, anchored to a fixed point in space called the holding fix — defined by a navigation aid, a GPS waypoint, or an intersection of radials. The aircraft flies a one-minute leg outbound, makes a 180-degree turn, flies a one-minute leg back inbound to the fix, and turns again, tracing the same oval repeatedly. By convention turns are made to the right unless a chart or controller specifies otherwise, and at higher altitudes the legs are timed longer to account for the greater true airspeed. The discipline of holding is real airmanship. The pilot must enter the pattern using one of three standard entries — direct, parallel, or teardrop — chosen by the angle at which the aircraft arrives relative to the inbound course, all while managing wind that constantly tries to blow the oval out of shape. Controllers stack multiple aircraft in the same hold at different altitudes, each separated vertically, peeling the lowest one off to the approach as space opens up. A hold is not an emergency; it is the system working as designed, trading a few extra minutes aloft for the guarantee that every arrival is sequenced safely. The pilot in command still decides, per 14 CFR §91.3 — including, if fuel runs low, declaring minimum fuel or an emergency to be moved to the front of the line.