{"id":2534,"date":"2013-12-12T07:01:17","date_gmt":"2013-12-12T15:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.mechadigital.net\/?p=2534"},"modified":"2021-08-26T20:37:57","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:37:57","slug":"92-looking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/92-looking\/","title":{"rendered":"#92 Where are you Looking?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t believe it\u2019s something we think about very much once we\u2019ve accumulated a certain amount of experience.\u00a0 So sometimes it doesn\u2019t occur to us to ask the new flier, \u201cWhere are you looking?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DSCN2769\"<\/a>
Two CFI’s comparing notes. Unfortunately these two are both looking at the camera! Brian Lansburgh and John Creason<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It may be that the most simple case of the importance of where your gaze falls is in the landing.\u00a0 Many new fliers are so concerned with the plane\u2019s altitude and position, that they look at that centerline right in front of them.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t work.\u00a0 Have you ever tried to keep a car right next to the center line of the road as it whizzes past?\u00a0 If you look out your window and down at that line, you\u2019ll be all over the place.\u00a0 But if you move your gaze to a point way down the highway in front of you, it will suddenly become much easier to hold your position relative to that line.\u00a0 For the same reason, if you\u2019ll look beyond the end of the runway, you\u2019ll have far more success maintaining course, heading and even altitude than you would if you focus right in front of the airplane.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the more advanced case of the importance of where you look is to be found in aerobatics.\u00a0 Every good aerobatics teacher will tell you where you should be looking at each phase of an aerobatic maneuver.\u00a0 Take the loop:\u00a0 As we pull, we watch the horizon as it disappears under the nose.\u00a0 Then we look to one side to see the angle that we are assuming relative to the horizon.\u00a0 After we reach the top of this fun maneuver and are about to come down the \u201cbackside\u201d, we look up through the greenhouse or the canopy, the better to catch the horizon as it comes back into view so we can assume the proper pitch attitude.<\/p>\n

When I teach the \u201cLazy 8\u201d, I find that many of my students fail to look at the shape of that imaginary half circle they are drawing above and below the horizon.\u00a0 But isn\u2019t that where the maneuver gets its name?\u00a0 It should be the most important consideration in performing this maneuver.<\/p>\n

\"DSC06001\"<\/a>
When that diagonal jury strut is straight up and down relative to the horizon, we are at 45 degrees of pitch (taken from the Cessna 140 during the \u201cPole Creek Fire\u201d).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I teach the \u201cWhoopee Stall\u201d in the Cessna 140, I use the diagonal jury strut to indicate when we are at 45 degrees of pitch.\u00a0 We must shift our vision to that strut as we increase the pitch and as soon as we reach it, we change our focus to straight ahead and finish the maneuver.<\/p>\n

How important is this issue?\u00a0 Extremely.\u00a0 One of the best examples can be found with the steep turn.\u00a0 Most pilots roll into the bank and keep an eye on the altimeter and VSI.\u00a0 Of secondary interest to them is the view out the front.\u00a0 It should be the other way around.\u00a0 If you totally ignore the instrumentation, you can perform a perfectly acceptable steep turn with absolutely no instrument reference.\u00a0 Simply assume a level flight attitude and note the cowling\u2019s relationship to the horizon.\u00a0 Then bring the power up and roll into the turn while maintaining that pitch attitude and \u201cdragging the nose\u201d across the horizon.\u00a0 At the end of 360 degrees of turn, you\u2019ll be real close to the altitude at which you started.\u00a0 With practice, this technique can be refined and the altitude will be held even closer.<\/p>\n

Where you look is of such importance that one of the maneuvers in my flight training bag o\u2019 tricks depends on it totally.\u00a0 \u201cSky Doodles\u201d are maneuvers during which we describe figures on the horizon.\u00a0 We pretend that we have a forty-mile-long Walt Disney style animator\u2019s brush dripping with India ink attached to the nose of our airplane.\u00a0 We use that imaginary brush to draw squares first.\u00a0 Half of the square is above the horizon and half below.\u00a0 We draw these figures using both coordinated turns and wings-level yawing movements.\u00a0 Once comfortable with squares we\u2019ll draw circles or figure eights.\u00a0 But the shape of the figure or whether or not we\u2019re coordinated is of little importance compared to our gaze at the sky and our manipulation of that imaginary brush to draw those figures.<\/p>\n

Where you look can often be the detail which transforms a fumbling attempt into a polished execution of many aerial maneuvers.<\/p>\n

So perhaps all of us should ask ourselves, \u201cwhere am I looking?\u201d no matter what maneuver we are performing.\u00a0 From the lowly level turn to the classic \u201cCuban Eight\u201d, where we look is often the key to our success as we learn the maneuvers that will transform us from ground-pounders into fliers.<\/p>\n

Happy Swooping!<\/p>\n

Brian<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When I teach the \u201cLazy 8\u201d, I find that many of my students fail to look at the shape of that imaginary half circle they are drawing above and below the horizon. But isn\u2019t that where the maneuver gets its name? It should be the most important consideration in performing this maneuver.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[35,67,174,178],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}