Why is the yawing movement the least understood part of aircraft handling???

[David MacRay]

You’re right about getting rushed sometimes instead of just being allowed to spend some extra time practicing things. I suspect they’re worried that you might get upset later about spending the extra bucks to have them riding along while you did it. It adds up quick. Also flying better seems unnecessary to pass a flight test. Or instructor rating etc..

Sometimes you catch a break and get really great advice. One of those times happened here for me recently. I believe it was Liquid Charlie who wrote. “Don’t step on the ball. Use the pedals to squeeze the ball.” It’s subtle and awesome advice.

When initiating a forward slip it’s fine to kick the back end over while I dip the wing and drop the nose because I want to hurry up to make the plane lose height while keeping the airspeed the same.

I especially love doing it a bit aggressively when I end up a bit too high on final with a new instructor that does not seem familiar with actually doing slips in a plane with students. I wonder if it would have scared some of them less if I actually did something dangerous? Like take them flying in a plane equipped with conventional gear. Of course that’s not as fun with more experienced instructors because they know exactly what’s going on.

Most of the time I want to gently remove adverse yaw. The ball tells me when it’s there even in the slightest amount.

Squeeze the ball between the lines. Slowly you will develop a feeling for it, you feel the seat moving and you’ll naturally fix it with subtle correct rudder input. I notice my sensitivity towards doing it well goes away quite a bit when I don’t fly enough. It’s still there but I often need to tune it up a bit.

Here’s where I will diverge from some of the guys that learned to fly in a great old plane. You might be able to get even better using the mighty modern C-172 to practice. My reason being the adverse yaw is much easier to ignore. That’s what I think makes many of those “bad pilots”. The fact they can pretty much steer 172s with the yoke ignoring the foot rests. In fact as long as there is not much cross wind, it even sort of lands ok. I suspect some pilots drive them like a eurocoupe.

After trying to fly 172s well by the seat of my pants for the last several years. I found this year I didn’t need to look at the ball in the Citabria much at all, adverse yaw is pretty obvious in it.

Worked so well the instructor said something I almost never hear, “you might be a natural “. Uh, trust me, I know I’m the polar opposite of a natural pilot.

I just got kicked off the Citabria for being over 250 pounds so it will be interesting to see how it is to go back to flying the 172 again. I suspect it’s going to be nice to climb better.

[TwinOtterFan]

Sometimes you catch a break and get really great advice. One of those times happened here for me recently.

More than once I have found the answer in this forum, very grateful, everyone takes a lot of time and writes up some fantastic stuff. I actually recently visited an old thread of mine as I was having some issues and went back to read the input again. It helped and my next flight was much improved.

[David MacRay]

Yeah I have benefited greatly from discussing things online for sure.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

The dumming down of flight training started with the Cessna 172.





Their add above is proof positive of it.