Trim Use During Approach Phase in Visual Patterns
Seriously, Whopity? Four days? Please name and shame!
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WoW, I'd never expected such response to this post, I'm receiving so many
suggestions that I can only thank you all for this, even if there is someone a little too rough in his comments ;-) I want to thank especially Piper.Classique, sevenstrokeroll, Big Pistons Forever and mad_jock, which are helping me to understand even myself :-D and are trying to be constructive.
I know the importance of mantain the right attitude for every phase of flight, and the importance of a correct use of (elevator) trim tab to obtain this. Teaching to my students what the trim wheel is for is very important to me, to trim for an airspeed, an attitude or for just relieve the force on the yoke.
In the past I came across some pilots who made me concerned about this matter: some of them where used to really overtrim (nose up, slow speed), so when it happened we had to go-around on base or final, the nose was so light that he struggled visibly completing the maneuver . Another one was an abituč of overshooting the final, so he was fine with doing steep turns at low speed to regain the centerline, using too much rudder and messing up with the ailerons. Thats why I came up with those mumblings over handling sensitivity and use of trim and so on... thoughts wich are meant for the initial phase of the circuit pattern training: after having demonstrated all the primary and secondary controls effects, climb and descents, slow flight and stall, in this phase I try to make them mix everything to perform a pattern safely as part of a teaching strategy.
When it comes the time to hit the pattern, I think it's useful if the student learn how to do it with stic and throttle, whit just little help from the trim: learning how to mantain that descent angle and that speed mixing pitch and power by his own, can definitely help in my opinion, when he will use the trim on heavier planes (or autotrim, autopilot maybe in the future), being more aware of what is going on under his hands. So, if we have the a/c fine trimmed for a downwind speed and then we start the approach reducing power, we just make the a/c have a healthy nose down tendency, wich is nice to understand energy management in the pattern, here the pilot will act to obtain the right speed and the right descent angle.
Again, this isn't done with a complete out of trim a/c, but just the amount to keep on the hands of the students the responsability of the landing, and just until necessary. Nobody here is teaching to land with an a/c trimmed for a dive as well nobody should stress too much about trimming to a complete neutral control feeling in approach, at least on a vfr approach! Training aircraft are built to naturally lower the nose when short on energy, even the full automated airbus leaves to the pilot the job of round up the descent, level off and flare. Overtrimming on base or final, at low speed/high AOA and low altitude, can turn out to be more dangerous than the opposite I think.
About go around, the priorities are stop the descent, increase speed and then climb. Stop losing altitude/energy should be an instinctive all-in-one maneuver of level flight attitude+full power; if to do it I have to keep the nose down in order to regain energy because of a nose-up over-trimmed a/c, well it's everything but instinctive.
To conclude, if in vfr patterns the most important thing is to look out, basically I want make them learn how to keep the correct attitude just with external references, keeping rwy and aiming point under control while cross-checking the airspeed, this until the pilot freezes the big picture in his mind. After that, in my opinion, is far more easyer to show how with that specific picture/power setting we can obtain safe approaches even without airspeed indication, or how to fixate that particular attitude on the artificial horizon to obtain the same performance when visual conditions are poor, etc... Again sorry about my non-native english, I'm just trying to do my best, maybe everything it's just mental mastubation. I'm not trying to reinvent anything cause nothing more new can be invented about flight, that's just an effort to find my way in it, for sure I miss a standardization course
.
Thanks for your comments.
suggestions that I can only thank you all for this, even if there is someone a little too rough in his comments ;-) I want to thank especially Piper.Classique, sevenstrokeroll, Big Pistons Forever and mad_jock, which are helping me to understand even myself :-D and are trying to be constructive.
I know the importance of mantain the right attitude for every phase of flight, and the importance of a correct use of (elevator) trim tab to obtain this. Teaching to my students what the trim wheel is for is very important to me, to trim for an airspeed, an attitude or for just relieve the force on the yoke.
In the past I came across some pilots who made me concerned about this matter: some of them where used to really overtrim (nose up, slow speed), so when it happened we had to go-around on base or final, the nose was so light that he struggled visibly completing the maneuver . Another one was an abituč of overshooting the final, so he was fine with doing steep turns at low speed to regain the centerline, using too much rudder and messing up with the ailerons. Thats why I came up with those mumblings over handling sensitivity and use of trim and so on... thoughts wich are meant for the initial phase of the circuit pattern training: after having demonstrated all the primary and secondary controls effects, climb and descents, slow flight and stall, in this phase I try to make them mix everything to perform a pattern safely as part of a teaching strategy.
When it comes the time to hit the pattern, I think it's useful if the student learn how to do it with stic and throttle, whit just little help from the trim: learning how to mantain that descent angle and that speed mixing pitch and power by his own, can definitely help in my opinion, when he will use the trim on heavier planes (or autotrim, autopilot maybe in the future), being more aware of what is going on under his hands. So, if we have the a/c fine trimmed for a downwind speed and then we start the approach reducing power, we just make the a/c have a healthy nose down tendency, wich is nice to understand energy management in the pattern, here the pilot will act to obtain the right speed and the right descent angle.
Again, this isn't done with a complete out of trim a/c, but just the amount to keep on the hands of the students the responsability of the landing, and just until necessary. Nobody here is teaching to land with an a/c trimmed for a dive as well nobody should stress too much about trimming to a complete neutral control feeling in approach, at least on a vfr approach! Training aircraft are built to naturally lower the nose when short on energy, even the full automated airbus leaves to the pilot the job of round up the descent, level off and flare. Overtrimming on base or final, at low speed/high AOA and low altitude, can turn out to be more dangerous than the opposite I think.
About go around, the priorities are stop the descent, increase speed and then climb. Stop losing altitude/energy should be an instinctive all-in-one maneuver of level flight attitude+full power; if to do it I have to keep the nose down in order to regain energy because of a nose-up over-trimmed a/c, well it's everything but instinctive.
To conclude, if in vfr patterns the most important thing is to look out, basically I want make them learn how to keep the correct attitude just with external references, keeping rwy and aiming point under control while cross-checking the airspeed, this until the pilot freezes the big picture in his mind. After that, in my opinion, is far more easyer to show how with that specific picture/power setting we can obtain safe approaches even without airspeed indication, or how to fixate that particular attitude on the artificial horizon to obtain the same performance when visual conditions are poor, etc... Again sorry about my non-native english, I'm just trying to do my best, maybe everything it's just mental mastubation. I'm not trying to reinvent anything cause nothing more new can be invented about flight, that's just an effort to find my way in it, for sure I miss a standardization course
. Thanks for your comments.
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Forget about anything big when you are doing intial training. Any changes in flying style are dealt with in type ratings and line training.
Your only job is to teach people how to fly single engine piston aircraft properly.
And all the points you have been making arn't for the circuit they should have been taught and practised well away from the circuit. Hitting the pattern maybe something you strive to do as quickly as possible but it is counter productive and you just spend hours hammering out circuits with the student working at the max never quite getting in front of the aircraft which reduces thier learning rate. The reason why people over control and do daft things is because they are completely maxed out with no time to think. They react and because they don't have the previous exercises understood and hardwired in yet their reaction is the wrong one. If they know what they are doing and have spare capacity they see situations before they need aggressive control inputs to recover and there isn't a problem. The plane does the flying and the work load is decreased.
The only time you don't want the student trimming all the time is in the flare, below Vs+20 during stalling and the verdict is out on trimming during steep turns mainly because some people don'y have the brut force to do it without trimming a little bit.
I work as a line trainer on a manual turboprop I have to spend rather alot of time with new FO's and some of the more experenced ones teaching them how to trim properly and how to let the aircraft do the flying. I must admit a few years ago thought maybe I was a bit long in the tooth and away from regular instructing to comment on threads like these. But then I realised hang on here I am teaching new FO's the basics every day. Some of them arrive thinking you trim for a flight level not an airspeed. Secondary effects of controls is a mystery. And the power levers are up and down like a fiddlers elbow and approaches are completed inspite of the pilots inputs not because of them. The only way to tackle this is at the grass roots level of intial flight training.
And one of the big problems is people training for the future using pesudo airline ops and techniques. In the main the instructor thinks this is the way things are done in airlines when it isn't and also the student doesn't have the correct foundations to build the next step onto which they will be taught when it comes to actually flying that particular hardware. If they don't have the foundations there when the poo really hits the fan eg Buffalow or AF477 they don't have anything to go back to.
Your only job is to teach people how to fly single engine piston aircraft properly.
And all the points you have been making arn't for the circuit they should have been taught and practised well away from the circuit. Hitting the pattern maybe something you strive to do as quickly as possible but it is counter productive and you just spend hours hammering out circuits with the student working at the max never quite getting in front of the aircraft which reduces thier learning rate. The reason why people over control and do daft things is because they are completely maxed out with no time to think. They react and because they don't have the previous exercises understood and hardwired in yet their reaction is the wrong one. If they know what they are doing and have spare capacity they see situations before they need aggressive control inputs to recover and there isn't a problem. The plane does the flying and the work load is decreased.
The only time you don't want the student trimming all the time is in the flare, below Vs+20 during stalling and the verdict is out on trimming during steep turns mainly because some people don'y have the brut force to do it without trimming a little bit.
I work as a line trainer on a manual turboprop I have to spend rather alot of time with new FO's and some of the more experenced ones teaching them how to trim properly and how to let the aircraft do the flying. I must admit a few years ago thought maybe I was a bit long in the tooth and away from regular instructing to comment on threads like these. But then I realised hang on here I am teaching new FO's the basics every day. Some of them arrive thinking you trim for a flight level not an airspeed. Secondary effects of controls is a mystery. And the power levers are up and down like a fiddlers elbow and approaches are completed inspite of the pilots inputs not because of them. The only way to tackle this is at the grass roots level of intial flight training.
And one of the big problems is people training for the future using pesudo airline ops and techniques. In the main the instructor thinks this is the way things are done in airlines when it isn't and also the student doesn't have the correct foundations to build the next step onto which they will be taught when it comes to actually flying that particular hardware. If they don't have the foundations there when the poo really hits the fan eg Buffalow or AF477 they don't have anything to go back to.
I second everything MJ says. For ab initio I teach 500 feet AGL to the flare should be the same for every landing. Therefore the first thing they want to work on is getting the aircraft to the 500 foot spot on speed, trimmed, lined up with the centreline and at a point back from the runway to give the correct flight path. If the aircraft is not in good shape at the 500 foot point we go around as if they were not able to stay ahead of the aircraft to this point it will not get better the closer we get.
Also working on getting a consistent stabilized approach first, makes teaching the flare and hold off much easier.
Towards the end of my time as a full time instructor I got all the problem and not progressing students. If the student was stuck in the circuit the first thing I did was go to the practice area and re teach Attitudes and Movements. Invariably the problem was the fact that their instructor had rushed though the foundation ex 5 to 9 and the student did not understand the basics of aircraft control.......
Also working on getting a consistent stabilized approach first, makes teaching the flare and hold off much easier.
Towards the end of my time as a full time instructor I got all the problem and not progressing students. If the student was stuck in the circuit the first thing I did was go to the practice area and re teach Attitudes and Movements. Invariably the problem was the fact that their instructor had rushed though the foundation ex 5 to 9 and the student did not understand the basics of aircraft control.......
Last edited by Big Pistons Forever; 31st Oct 2012 at 21:30.
I think that says it all, Big Pistons. No point whatever trying to fly circuits when the student is already working full time at basic handling.
Instructor's best friend, a packet of post-its to cover instruments......
Instructor's best friend, a packet of post-its to cover instruments......
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teaching the circuit/pattern...
in a modern circuit/pattern, there is actually littletime on final...the most important part if you ask me
so, why not take your student to a place where final can be five miles long and DO trim so that you can let go of the controls and still have your vref maintained at the proper rate of descent.
practicing ground reference maneuvers like turn about apoint and rectangular course over the ground is important
but the real aid in landing is ''slow flight'' or flight at minimum controllable airspeed.
you can't learn how to land in the few seconds of final in an average traffic pattern.
also...have the student fly a low pass over the runway at a few feet, not touching down...(full landing configuration) and then without warning, reduce the throttle and they will end up with the niceest touchdown you can imagine
(use a good long runway for this)
in a modern circuit/pattern, there is actually littletime on final...the most important part if you ask me
so, why not take your student to a place where final can be five miles long and DO trim so that you can let go of the controls and still have your vref maintained at the proper rate of descent.
practicing ground reference maneuvers like turn about apoint and rectangular course over the ground is important
but the real aid in landing is ''slow flight'' or flight at minimum controllable airspeed.
you can't learn how to land in the few seconds of final in an average traffic pattern.
also...have the student fly a low pass over the runway at a few feet, not touching down...(full landing configuration) and then without warning, reduce the throttle and they will end up with the niceest touchdown you can imagine
(use a good long runway for this)
