This generally means that your crosscheck is slow, or incorrect. The reason they let you do a steepturn is in fact to either train you to improve the crosscheck and attitude flying in an instruction flight or to see how your crosscheck an attitude flying skills are on a checkflight.

Knowing attitude and thrust references helps, but you should be able to do this maneuver within limits even without knowing them.

When you are going to do a steep turn, first make sure you are nicely stable in straight and level flight AND well trimmed.

During roll in, look at the attitude indicator while you are rolling. Roll in with a constant roll rate and keep the attitude (body angle) constant untill you reach roughly 30° of bank and the pull back on the yoke a bit to put the nose up 1 or 2 degrees higher (2 is maybee a bit much) and at the same time increase the power a bit. Once you are at 45° bank, keep have a look at the vertical speed / altitude and if it is going somewere look back at the attitude indicator and correct the pitch by a defined amount*. Then contine your instrument scan as described in your basic instrument flying course you should have lying around somewhere from basic training.

* Attitude flying means that you set the attitude you estimate needed for a certain performance (rate of climb/descent/speed, SLF, bank angle, ...), then wait for the result and if the result is not as expected change the attitude by a defined amount.

It is also nice to know what result a certain pitch (body angle) change will have on the ROC/ROD (Rate of Climb/Descent).

Very easy, look at you mach number. For eample Mach 0.5 (should be something like that if you do this exercise around 15000 feet at 250 KIAS).µ

M0.50 means you are doing roughly 5 Nm/min

A 1 degree attitude change (pitch/body angle or whatever they call it were you fly) will result in a 100 feet/Nm change. Multiply 5 Nm/min x 100 feet/Nm = 500 feet/min change.

So you see that if you are climbing 250 feet/min during your exercise, you have to put the dot on the attitude indicator 0,5° lower.

That is the trick, you have to put the dot where you want and keep it there while you are continuing your instrument scan, waiting for the result.

That is called attitude flying, if you don't do this then it is called needle chasing. The latter I assume is what you were doing.

The same technique applies for flying an ILS and any other phase of instrument flying.

Chiao