Pitch v. Power

I've been struggling to find a clever way to effectively teach the relationship between pitch and power, without much success.

There are two basic schools of thought on the deal: Pitch controls altitude and power controls airspeed or pitch controls airspeed and power controls altitude.

Personally, I fall more into the latter camp because I was taught to use pitch for airspeed control and power to control altitude or to maintain a desired rate of climb/descent.

But the reality is somewhat in the middle: If you adjust your pitch you need to adjust your power to maintain level flight and likewise, any power adjustment will require a pitch adjustment to maintain level flight.

Anyhow, it's a complex relationship which makes it incredibly difficult for primary students to master. (The same holds true for advanced pilots, so there's no shame on the part of primary students. It's just a difficult concept to grasp.)

I've been doing a lot of airspeed changes, configuration changes, glides at specific airspeeds, slow flight, etc... and really stressing the sight picture out the window to my students.

I rarely look at the airspeed indicator anymore, I can just tell what speed we're doing by the sight picture out the window. But I get to fly several times a day and it still took a while to really get comfortable with trusting what I was seeing out the window.

I did some searching to find a good explanation I could, um, steal and found out I wasn't alone. From what I've seen so far, pretty much every instructor finds it difficult to effectively explain pitch/power in a way that students grasp immediately.

Truth be told, in cruising flight I don't really care which order folks use (pitch for altitude, power for airspeed or pitch for airspeed, power for altitude) although I prefer to keep it simple and stick with my preferred method.

In the traffic pattern, particularly on final, there's only one way to do it in my mind, and that's to use pitch to control airspeed and power to control altitude.

The reason is that if you get on the back side of the power curve, pitch for airspeed, power for altitude always works. But the other way (power to control airspeed, pitch to control altitude) only works until you run out of power, which is quickly in a 172.

Nobody wants to push the nose down on short final when they're sinking too quickly, at least not initially. It's a natural reaction, which is also a reaction that'll get you in a world of hurt because if you don't, the airplane will slow down further, have a greater deficit between power required and power available and start coming down like a very expensive rock.

In times of stress, we revert to what we've learned first, and if our training was we pitch down to increase airspeed then that's what should happen when we get too slow on short final and the stall horn starts going off.

If we've been trained to increase altitude by pulling back on the elevator, that's what we're going to do on short final when we're sinking too quickly because we're really going too slow. In this case, our training will only make the situation worse.

That's where sight pictures really come into play. We go up to 2,500 AGL, set up a 63-knot glide with full flaps and I explain that this is the same picture we should be seeing on short final. The thinking is that the more comfortable folks become with that picture at altitude the less freaked out they'll be by it at 100 feet.

So far it's worked reasonably well, but I still have to remind folks to push the nose down on short final to stay on our target airspeed.

Where it comes back to bite is early in training, where the pitch changes are very aggressive as students hunt for a target airspeed. That winds up in a pretty uneven ride around the pattern as they chase the airspeed indicator trying to get their target airspeed with pitch instead of letting the airplane slow down naturally as we add in flaps (and drag) throughout the approach.

As much as I try to stress just looking outside for the proper sight picture the focus quickly moves to the airspeed indicator and the approach goes to hell.

So, I think I'm going to start covering the thing up more and forcing students to rely on the sight picture.

It'll be a test on my part too, because as much as I rely on the sight picture I still like to sneak a peak at the airspeed indicator. Just in case.