And it requires being tuned in to the outside you have to know where to look to get that data
and hold your pitch constant.
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. In this video I'm going to show you
a couple of the highlights from a lesson I did just last week with Jeremy where I noticed a few
very very common mistakes he was making in the traffic pattern. So we simply just covered the
flight instruments and solved the problems. I'm going to show you four things from the traffic
pattern that will make you a much sharper and much safer pilot. Now the audio didn't record on this
unfortunately - drives me crazy - but I'm on a lesson, I'm not worried about production.
I'm completely focused on teaching Jeremy.
So what I'm going to do here is just show you the overhead camera, I'm going to show you what I
saw and I'll use voice-over here to talk about how we fixed the problems that came up.
Alright right the first thing i noticed is after departure we're climbing out on the upwind
and his pitch is kind of all over the place. He's not holding Vy properly. One problem is his pitch
is just not high enough, but you see it coming down right there. That's the pitch fluctuating,
that tends to happen when you sort of fly by the numbers and chase the data you see on the
instruments. As he turns here he pulls it back up, you can see the pitch rise right there, but
it's kind of all over the place and we're going to try to fix that by covering the instruments.
Now I request that he holds best rate of climb all the way up to pattern altitude
and it requires being tuned in to the outside. You have to know where to look to get that data
and hold your pitch constant. Here you can kind of see him
where he gets the pitch right and then the pitch starts to fall you can see it right there.
So immediately I'm thinking okay, we need to cover the flight instruments.
Okay here's how we do it: I take one single piece of paper and I tear off the area that
would cover the altimeter and then skewer it over the knob of the attitude indicator.
I do this so that Jeremy can refer to the airspeed if he wants to. He can pull down that corner.
He can also reference the altimeter at all times to make sure we're at pattern altitude. But watch
here how it fixes the pitch problems. You can see his head is up looking out the window. He
has nothing to refer to other than the altimeter so he tends to hold his pitch more constant
and you can see much less variance as he makes the turn onto the crosswind.
The second thing that I saw was as we turned onto the crosswind, now we're in a climbing left turn,
when you roll out to the right here in left-hand traffic, when you roll out on that crosswind,
you're rolling against all of the left-turning tendencies of the engine, like everything about
the motor is pulling you left. So you almost, it's very hard to use too much right rudder,
you have to almost stand on the rudder to get the coordination back into the airplane.
You can see right here in the ball that he's not using enough rudder as he rolls out that
ball is way to the right. So you can't feel what I felt once we covered the flight instruments,
but again that was the solution to the problem another thing that I noticed is,
in the downwind, I saw him kind of dividing too much of his attention to the power. So
he's like you know spending a lot of time trying to get the power setting just right.
Now you're not going to be exact with what I'm about to say, but you're going
to get pretty darn close. There are really two major sound changes in a Cessna 172.
After you level off in the traffic pattern, when you pull the power back to about 2200 or 2100 rpm
you will hear the first major sound change. The next major sound change happens at about
1800 or 1700. So listen to this, this is the good part about not having the cockpit audio.
You can hear the ambient noise, listen to this sound change as he pulls the power back. This is
after we've covered the flight instruments, he's tuned into the airplane. He's hearing the engine,
he's hearing the slipstream over the airplane and he just without even looking
at it pulls the power back to approximately the right spot. This is what it sounds like.
Okay and the last thing is - again it's about the sound of the airplane - what's the sound
that the slipstream is making over the airplane? We're flying with the flight instruments covered,
they're just skewered so he can actually look at the airspeed anytime he wants.
But what I'm trying to get him to do is tune into the idea that when the flight controls feel this
way and when the sound of the slipstream gets to the approximate approach speed he should be able
to kind of sense that. And there's no way to learn that sense, other than working with the flight
instruments covered so that you can actually tune into the machine. Listen to the difference
in the sound here when we're going really really fast with the motor revved up high ...
... as opposed to here with the power at idle on approach.
Alright, I guess there are some benefits to not having the audio work
from inside the airplane, but this is an amazing thing to do
if you're a flight instructor or if you want to bring this exercise to your flight instructors.
Remember that flight instructors can join our CFI club, they'll get you 25%
off Ground School, they get the app for free. We do monthly CFI meetings, just have
them email support@learnthefinerpoints.com, and it's totally free to join our CFI club.
So what you want to do is just skewer the flight instruments with a piece of paper
right over the knob of the attitude indicator. We're not trying to scare anybody here so you
can tell students or if you're the pilot flying you can look at the airspeed any time you want,
you can look at the flight instruments anytime you want. But just having that barrier, just
that simple piece of paper, will tune you into the airplane in ways you can't even understand. It's
similar to when you dim the interior lights at night, how the whole outside world sort of
comes to life. The same thing happens when you cover up the flight instruments and tune into
all of the noises and the feel of the airplane. It's really a fundamental flying skill.
'Stick and rudder' calls it the flying instinct, I think, but it's a way to build in
some intimate relationship with the machine that you're flying.
Alright, I hope those four tips help you become a safer, better pilot. You can find us online
at learnthefinerpoints.com. We have a free three-day trial of the Ground School app,
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