Right Seat: Fly Around...And Around

Despite being introduced early in training, ground reference maneuvers are a complex and delicate balance of many different skills. In the hierarchy of difficult private pilot maneuvers, the rectangular course, S-turns, and turns around a point are well past stalls and steep turns, and for some pilots they even give landings a run for the top spot on the challenging chart.

Experienced pilots may go ahead and scoff, but there’s a reason you don’t consider ground reference maneuvers that difficult to master: They are hard to measure. It’s easy to tell if we lose or gain 100 feet or 10 knots, but determining perfect ground tracks of circles, semicircles, and rectangles? It’s nearly impossible. The airplane is constantly changing, the dynamics never the same.

This is the beauty of ground reference maneuvers. They are deceptively simple to perform, but can take a lifetime to get right. Fly in a circle? No problem! Keeping your circle from turning into an oval 800 feet above the ground with a strong wind while maintaining altitude and doing it all coordinated? If flying in a circle is like throwing a baseball, then performing turns around a point is throwing a perfect curveball. It’s Captain Numbers’ worst nightmare.

This month we explore ground reference maneuvers in “Stand Your Ground,” beginning on page 36. The story lays out the basics of each maneuver and gives you a few things to think about as you begin to practice. What it doesn’t do is explain all the nuances of how to fly turns around a point, S-turns, and the rectangular course. It can’t. Like the
curveball, we can teach you how to throw, and the game situation in which to use it, but getting the strikes is up to you.

Pilots use dozens of markers to judge each other’s skills. Some judge landings, some judge how clean the pilot keeps her cockpit, and others look at things like how well the pilot holds altitude. These things are all important, and all are a window into another pilot’s thoughts, priorities, and goals. I think there’s one sleeper that most pilots either don’t notice or don’t put much stock in—how well he maintains a parallel track to the runway on downwind. It’s the real-world application of the rectangular course.

It seems like such a silly thing, but it can have huge implications. Like holding altitude, you get a sense for how invested the pilot is in precise flying. It’s also an indicator of efficiency and awareness of his surroundings. By letting the airplane be pushed ever wider on the downwind, the pilot is causing trouble behind him with other airplanes in the pattern as they struggle to match his 747 track. Finally, it’s a safety indicator. Stall/spin accidents are a troublesome and persistent problem, often occurring in the traffic pattern. Let the wind blow your pattern tighter than you’d intended, and you’ve set yourself up for a tight turn from downwind to base, and then base to final. Overshoot and you’ve formed the recipe for a classic fatal accident scenario.

Plus, flying a perfect downwind makes you look good.