Become One With the Airplane

We've all heard the pitches about flying by the seat of your pants, and we're told to "feel" the airplane. And "listen" to it talk to you. And study the windshield and try to understand what it's telling you. But how many pilots out there are buying what we're selling? Sadly, not many.

Many pilots mistakenly believe that an airplane is a machine, and as is the case with so many other machines, you pull this lever at a specific time and push that pedal at another and that's known as flying. They think the gauges will tell us all we need to know, so by mastering the gauges, coupled with an occasional look outside to keep from bumping into things, we become aviators. Those of us who preach forming a partnership with the airplane, of trying to understand it and become part of it, don't call pure mechanical manipulation of the controls flying. We call it three-dimensional driving. To actually fly, you need to sense what the airplane is feeling, see what it is trying to do, and hear its many voices telling you what is happening at that moment. If you're a control manipulator but don't pay attention to your other senses, you'll miss the harmony and the additional safety that comes from knowing intuitively what the airplane is going to do before it does it.

There are a couple of training exercises that will put you miles ahead of your airplane and make you much more comfortable in virtually every flying situation. We're going to take each sense and each point of physical contact with the airplane separately and try to make you more aware of what they are capable of telling you.

Seat-of-your-pants flying exists

For this one, you'll need your instructor on board because, at one point, you're going to close your eyes.

While flying straight and level, ask your instructor to crank in some aileron with no rudder. Your job is to just sit there, watch the ball, and concentrate on what you're feeling. At the same time, look directly at the nose and see how it reacts in relation to the horizon. Try to picture your posterior as sitting in a shallow V. When the airplane yaws, inertia makes your body move up one side of the V (actually, it's sliding across the seat), increasing pressure on that side. The ball will move in the same direction as your bottom.

If the yoke is moved in the other direction, you'll feel the pressures reverse. What you're looking for is the increased pressure on one side and how it fades (both sides are even) as the ball moves back to center. Ask your instructor to do the same thing with rudder pressure in either direction and with no aileron.

Now, ask your instructor to start sliding the airplane around the sky while you watch the ball and feel what your bottom is telling you. He can pull the nose up, pull the power to idle, roll left and down with no rudder, which will exaggerate the ball movement. (If you're flying something older like an Aeronca Champ, he won't need to exaggerate.) In general, you want him to flop around the sky in a wildly uncoordinated manner.

The goal of this crude demonstration is to calibrate your posterior with the ball. Watch as it slides around and mentally connect it to the sensation you're feeling where your pants meet the seat. You'll also feel a sensation in your torso, as if your entire body is trying to move sideways (this will vary from airplane to airplane, depending on how far you're seated from the center of gravity--it's more obvious in tandem airplanes).

After a few minutes of flopping around, it's your turn to take over the rudder. The instructor still has the elevator and ailerons, and keeps pushing the ball out of center by sashaying around the sky with ailerons and elevator only. Use the rudder to keep the ball in the middle and feel the effect the moving ball has on your derriere where it's subtly sliding across the upholstery.

In Cessnas, the feeling is subtle and, at first, you'll have to work hard to sense it. When you finally feel it, however, it'll become obvious. In older airplanes that have more adverse yaw, it's obvious from the beginning.

Now comes the core of this training: Close your eyes while your instructor is still moving the airplane about. Now the only input you have to use in keeping the ball centered is the sensation in the seat of your pants. Really focus on the sensation and remember that we're simply increasing rudder pressure one way or the other until the sensation of pressure on one cheek disappears. It's subtle, but it's most definitely there. After you master this, it's not likely that you'll stall and then spin an airplane--your seat would recognize the sizeable off-center sensation needed to generate enough yaw to cause the aircraft to spin.

The windshield as a primary instrument

Are you actually "seeing" what the nose is doing, as opposed to just looking over it? There is a difference.

Actually seeing the nose means judging its every movement against the horizon and the ground. Once we see it, however, we have to put together a mental picture that continually monitors it--and deciphers what it's telling us. Depending on what we're doing at the time (glide, climb, and the like), it's giving us slightly different messages. However, there are some basic movements that apply, regardless of the regime.

Focus on the nose; pick something right at the end of it. Maybe you can see a portion of the spinner, or a line of screws becomes a reference point--a front sight, if you will, that you can track as it moves in relation to the horizon and the ground. A specific reference point will help you to detect movement sooner and be more exact in controlling it.

The goal of the first exercise was to make you physically aware of yaw, but your eyes can sense yaw, too, if you look for it. So, while your CFI is moving the airplane around in an uncoordinated fashion, study the movement of the nose both in yaw and in pitch. Glance at the ball from time to time. You'll notice that, if you couple your seat sensations with what your eyes are seeing, you don't even need to look at the panel to know when you're skidding or slipping.

Now, take the controls. This time, focus your mind on your nose reference point. Turn the yoke just a little without rudder and see what the nose does. Even modern airplanes that have had almost all adverse yaw engineered out of them will move their nose just a little in the opposite direction, if no rudder is used with the ailerons. Now crank in a lot of aileron with no rudder and you'll see (and feel) the nose much more.

By combining the sensations felt at the pilot/upholstery interface with visually tracking the movement of the nose, we have developed a tool that makes any unwanted yaw almost impossible to miss. This will make us much more precise, smoother, and safer pilots.

Visual pitch indicator

The nose gives us as much information in pitch as it does in yaw, and that translates to airspeed control, which further translates into safety. Getting really good at seeing the nose does not replace the airspeed indicator (ASI), but it does make you very aware of any pitch changes; therefore, you instantly know when airspeed is changing.

For every flight regime--climb, cruise, glide, and everywhere in between--there is an appropriate airspeed, and that airspeed can be clearly coupled to a given nose attitude. There is a very specific way in which the ASI is used to fine-tune the nose attitude for a given airspeed. In a glide, for instance, set an attitude and hold it. Give it time to stabilize, and then glance at the airspeed. When the airspeed stabilizes, it will tell you whether the nose is too low or too high. Then, make a very small attitude correction in the direction needed to correct the speed. Hesitate; check the airspeed again. Once the airspeed is right, the nose attitude also will be right--and if it doesn't change, the airspeed won't either.

Continue to cross-check inside the cockpit to make sure nothing has changed. Developing a heightened awareness of the nose increases safety, because the attitude difference between an appropriate glide speed and stalling is enough that we'll see the change happening well before it becomes a problem.

It does talk to us--if we listen

Now, examine another sense: hearing. Still with your instructor, put the airplane into approach configuration, with at least half flaps, and no power. Get it set exactly at glide speed and all trimmed up. Now, close your eyes and listen. Hear the sound of the wind going past. Drop the nose slightly and listen again. Notice how the wind noise changes? The cleaner the airplane (less flap, gear up, newer, sleeker), the less noticeable the change in sound will be, and it will take more speed change to be audible, but it'll still be there.

With eyes still closed, ask your instructor to slowly raise the nose enough that the airplane starts to work its way into a stall. You'll notice that, at some point, the wind noise drops off almost completely, giving a "cone of silence" effect that lets you know something is about to happen. The opposite happens when you lower the nose; you'll hear the airplane speed up, telling you it's time to cross-check the attitude and airspeed again.

That feeling in your finger tips

Go back and re-fly the last task, but this time, fly it yourself and keep your eyes open. Slowly pull the airplane into a stall and see what your fingertips are telling you. Anyone who has driven on snow doesn't have to be told when the car is on ice because they can feel the diminished control through the steering wheel, and the same is true of airplanes. As the lift goes out of the wings, the controls lose their traction and everything develops a "soft" feeling. It varies from airplane to airplane; some have a very clear bleed-off of pressure that parallels the speed reduction, while others don't exhibit the pressure loss until a few knots before the stall. But it's there.

The way in which you sense the contact of your hands with the yoke also determines how smoothly, and how well, you will fly. Flying is not a matter of moving the controls. It's changing pressure on the controls that results in their movement. If we sense the pressure we're applying on both the yoke and the rudder pedals, rather than actually thinking "movement," we'll all be smoother pilots.

"Flying by the seat of his pants" can be used in a derogatory manner. But a pilot who can fly that way will never be surprised by an airplane. Using all of our senses, we can get a more complete picture of what the airplane is doing--and what we must do in order to control it as precisely as possible.

Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor who has written approximately 2,200 articles and has flown more than 300 different types of aircraft. A CFI since 1967, he teaches in his Pitts S-2A Special. Visit his Web site.

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Links to additional resources about the topics discussed in this article are available at AOPA Flight Training Online.