A tune-up for the pilot
The route to the private pilot license seems a circuitous one, if the check ride is any indication. You start out as though there really is a purpose to this trip — a cross-country flight.
But before too many minutes have passed, the examiner breaks off the cross-country and soon you are circling a road intersection, silo, or pond, in a quest for an unchanging radius. After that, you find yourself flying off in a new direction — just above the stall speed — in a demonstration of slow flight; later, you'll stall it. Do those maneuvers have a useful purpose, or are they there to make the test harder? After all, once the examiner says you passed, you need never go silo hunting again, right?
A private pilot of many years who thought that way was having trouble with his landings: He landed flat in his Cessna 172, sometimes touching down nose first. He asked an instructor for a spring tune-up of his flying skills as the flying season began last year.
The instructor told him the solution to his landings lay not in further practice in the pattern, but in the practice area northeast of the airport. There, at a safe altitude, the instructor began slow-flight practice as taught in private pilot courses, but with one slight change. The pilot was not allowed to gain or lose even a foot of altitude. The student was beginning to think he had a Marine Corps drill instructor in the aircraft.
Approach-to-landing stall practice followed. Again, the pilot was not allowed to lose or gain any altitude as the aircraft slowed to a stall. The student was puzzled. Why was it so important to maintain altitude while slowing to a stall? Returning to the airport, he found out.
Just a foot above the runway, as the pilot entered the flare with the power off, the instructor called for a slow-flight demonstration. "Don't gain or lose any altitude!" The nose rose higher and higher. "Now stall it, but don't gain or lose any altitude." The result was a landing on the main gear, nosewheel well off the runway, his best landing ever.
What had once seemed useless meandering about the countryside in pursuit of a successful check ride suddenly made sense. Now, when landings get rusty, he practices precision slow flight and stalls in the practice area for a few minutes. He still had one other problem, one that occurs to most pilots who haven't flown in a while. He nearly always overshot or undershot his turns to final...which brings up turns about a point.
How many times after obtaining your license did you intentionally seek out a silo and circle it? Not at all? Turns about a point, as you'll recall, require maintaining an equal radius about a point regardless of the wind. S-turns, which require equal-radius circles on either side of a line such as a highway, add the additional burden of proper timing. Since the aircraft is to cross the line at a 90-degree angle, students (and experienced pilots) may find themselves running out of time to get the wings perpendicular to the line before reaching the road. Exercises that improve wind-drift correction and timing offer obvious benefits for your pattern work. But they can do more than polish the turn to final.
How many times have you seen a pilot flying a pattern that is too wide? For most of us, the answer to that question is, every flight. There could be a couple of reasons. The pilot may need to improve skills in correcting for the wind, and the ability to plan and control the ground track. Turns about a point and S-turns have obvious benefits with such problems. But it may also be that the pilot is unaware, because of a lack of experience or rusty flying skills, of the maneuvering capability of the aircraft. So the pilot flies a pattern 2 or 3 miles from the runway for "a little maneuvering room." Pilots new to multiengine flying are often guilty of wide patterns because of the greater speed, compared to their experience in single-engine aircraft.
Those pilots could benefit from another of the private pilot maneuvers, flight around a rectangular pattern. The object is to correct for wind on all sides to maintain a precise ground track. As with turns about a point, it's easy and even legal to cheat: Pick points on the ground that already are in the shape of the desired ground track, and do whatever it takes to get the airplane over those spots. Even aerobatic pilots, for all their talk of finesse and "the right stuff," end up doing whatever it takes to place the aircraft in the attitude needed for a specific maneuver.
Think you can't hit the centerline, every time? You can. You've been brainwashed into thinking that only airline pilots can land on the centerline. The secret is to concentrate. Additional private pilot precision practice, such as constant-speed and constant-rate descents and proper crosswind landing technique to control drift, can help. Pilots of large aircraft understand that on narrower runways, the centerline is the only place to land to avoid taking out runway lights.
None of us wants to go back to the kindergarten of flight training after obtaining the hard-won certificate, yet most pilots seem willing to spend an hour in the pattern every so often practicing takeoffs and landings. Why not try a few minutes in the practice area sometime working on precision maneuvers, just for fun? It may seem like work, at first, but precise ground tracks and landings will eventually emerge. Then it becomes a matter of pride rather than work.
