Originally Posted by
double_barrel
Yep, the difference is striking. There I am constantly fiddling with stuff and ending-up climbing or descending when I should be level or letting the speed drift off. He seems to do nothing - the plane just does exactly what he wants! I clearly still need to free-up some brain resources.
Two comments about this.
Firstly, the climbing and descending when you don't want to be is cured by using elevator trim. Get used to trimming a lot. Any time you raise or flower flap, or change the attitude and/or power setting there will be a corresponding trim change. If you have the time and money, go up and spend a lesson on trimming the plane to fly hands off. When you get it right you can change the attitude of the aircraft simply by leaning forward or backward - it's like magic. Get into the habit of constantly asking yourself, am I in trim?, and doing something about it if you are not.
The second comment is about why your instructor appears to do nothing but the plane flies like its on rails. There is a concept you may have heard of called "flying ahead of the plane". The most basic explanation is putting your brain ahead of where you actually are so that any changes in desired flight path are noticed immediately and dealt with. Your instructor is making the tiniest of adjustments of the controls in the correct sense to keep the aircraft exactly where they want it to be. You are probably at a point in your training where you spend more time reacting to what the aircraft is doing rather than positively controlling it and making it do what you want it to do. That is called "being behind the aircraft". This is one of those things that just requires hours of stick time to learn. You'll get there one day, remember we all (including your instructor) have been where you are.