Circling at your home airport isn't that tough. Familiar landmarks help establish proper lateral spacing from the runway. Because you know the landmarks well, you can pick them out from circling altitudes and in low visibility.Circling to an unfamiliar field in challenging conditions is another story. I was flying the C-130 to a remote radar station known as Tin City on the Alaskan Seward Peninsula. Visibility was two miles in blowing snow with winds gusting to 20 knots off the Bering Strait. After a tight procedure turn, to avoid Russian airspace, we descended on the NDB signal. At MDA we could see the cliff with the orange panel reminding us not to land short, but little else.We couldn't distinguish any local landmarks to circle to the opposite runway. The sky was white with blowing snow. The runway was white except for the panels that marked the touchdown zone. Rooftops were white and, worse yet, the hills lining the runway on three sides were white and blended into the sky. Without a system to get in the correct position, landing would have required a lot of luck or a crash response team.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/flight-safety/circling-with-precision