That's going to make you a sharper pilot who's more in touch with the aircraft.
I'm Jason Miller, a full-time professional flight instructor, On the finer points channel you can
join me as I bring you tips and tricks that I've learned from 20 years on the flight line.
Hello aviators. Welcome back to the finer points. I was recently out filming for our Ground School
app and there were three things that came up that I'm going to give you here in this video
that I think will add to your flying. These are things you may not have heard from your flight
instructor as you were coming through the system. Or if you're working with an instructor now it's
something that you guys can consider when you're out there practicing. The first thing is, on the
turn coordinator, which is by far one of my favorite instruments, I think it is a very
under-appreciated instrument in the panel – and so I just wanted to talk through the fact that when
those wings aren't banked, you are physically not turning, even if the aircraft is banked,
and also how to visualize slips and skids. Here are some thoughts. Alright,
so let's take a look at the turn coordinator, if those wings are not showing any sort of
turn – I'm gonna call it a turn not a bank because it technically doesn't show you the
bank of the aircraft – I mean I can bank the aircraft like this and if I use opposite rudder
I can keep those wings pretty much level. And you can see we're actually banked right,
so what you are seeing when the wings roll like that is the sort of rate of roll,
the turn coordinator as opposed to the turn indicator will show you that rate of roll.
You kind of have to just average those bounces when you're out in bumpy air like we are today.
But the ball beneath it is your inclinometer, shows you the quality of the turn.
In a coordinated turn the ball would just be sitting sort of dead center.
A little harder on a bumpy day like today but there it is. Okay, now if you were to be in
a slipping turn, the ball would move to the inside, so imagine that it's that's the tail
you can sort of see the tail. Visualize the ball as the tail falling toward the inside of the turn
as opposed to the ball moving to the outside of the turn as you would see in a skidding turn.
So if you just sort of visualize the ball as the tail of that little miniature aircraft
you can easily see what the quality of your turn is, and of course the goal is to keep the ball in
the center, but you don't want to get fixated on that, you want to do the lesson that I gave
you on how to feel all of this in the airplane. That's going to make you a sharper pilot who's
more in touch with the aircraft. Okay, so that's a great demo just bank the wings hold the rudder and
see that the aircraft is not turning. You have to believe that the little wings on that turn
coordinator are simply measuring heading change through the horizon. The other thing is you can
see the ball as the tail of your airplane – you see that – so that if you're in a slipping turn,
that is with your inside wing sort of leading the turn you've got top rudder or outside rudder
you can see the ball of the air of the little inclinometer as the tail of your airplane and
the same is true for a skid. The second thing that I wanted to point out is just how important
the geometry of an approach is. I'm over there at Oakland, I'm just practicing, I'm
filming, and by the way you can see that normally I'm with a student but in this video I've got the
cameras framed from the student perspective, so it's mounted perfectly at the design eye-height
of the Cessna. We've got a left wing view, we've got a panel view, we've got a me view, that's all
from our Ground School app. If you haven't seen the skills section of our Ground School app, it is
literally like having a CFI at home, so sometimes people ping me and say, hey, can we fly together,
and it's tough to get on my schedule right now, I say download the Ground School app, do the free
three-day trial, check out that skills section, regardless of whether or not you're a beginner or
an experienced pilot, I know that there's stuff in there that'll help you. So here I am in Oakland,
it's a really strong wind on this day and I'm at a thousand feet in the traffic pattern and they
ask me if I can fly a short approach, which was a surprise, so I'm high, I'm really high out there,
I'm a thousand feet on the base leg and I just wanted to remind everybody that the geometry
of your approach is really important. So I don't turn in here, I don't cut the corner at all, I fly
just until the last minute, and then watch, as I turn the airplane I go into a steep bank
and I let the nose fall. So you can see right here on the VSI, I'm getting a pretty large descent.
You can see here on the airspeed I'm not gaining too much airspeed, so my stall speed increase
here is negligible, because I'm not pulling, so I square off that turn to final, use a steep bank to
lose a lot of altitude. When I roll out on final – fortunately I had a strong wind to sort of finish
the job – but I made that runway easily. Another thing I want to show you guys is this drift
exercise. If you have access to a long runway, like a four or five-thousand-foot runway, this
will definitely help you perfect your crosswind technique and memorize what it looks like when the
aircraft is aligned with the runway. And I simply just line up with the right edge of the runway,
this is 28 left, and I just side-slip into the wind, side-slip downwind, side slip into the
wind for the full length of the runway as a low approach without ever intending to land. Alright
now we're going to try this drift exercise, we're going to get down to about 50 feet here
[radio calls] good and we are going to sort of fly the right edge of the runway,
and then we're going to slip, this is a side slip, we're keeping the nose pointed
straight down the runway, and we're just sort of drifting back and forth.
Go all the way left, and then we go back to the right, and you can see that you just point the
ailerons in the direction you want the aircraft to move and use just enough opposite rudder
to prevent the nose from coming, and it has this sideways motion. These are side slips.
Or called drift exercises. If you're a CFI working with a student that's having trouble
with crosswind landings it's a great place to start. Alright aviators, there you go,
three tips that I think will take your game up at least to 11. This game goes to 11.
And the Ground School app will take your game off the charts, so if you haven't seen it
definitely download it, do the free three-day trial, I know you're going to find stuff in there,
we keep improving the app, there's all sorts of direct links right to FAA textbooks,
there's flying videos in there, there's a knowledge section, practice written tests
and much much more. Also a huge thanks to the sponsors for their support of this channel.
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