3 Flying Habits To Kick

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Whether you’re just starting your flight training or you’re a flight instructor with tons of students, preventing these habits from the start will make your life so much easier. Here’s the habits to watch out for:

Not keeping your hand on the throttle during all phases of flight except cruise. If you’re just starting your flight training, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you just go ahead and accept your default position in the airplane: left hand gently holding the yoke and right hand on the throttle. Your right hand should be on that throttle except for the short time you take it off to adjust your flaps or mixture. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s okay to take your hand off the throttle during cruise when everything’s established and your throttle friction lock is set. Why all the fuss about keeping your hand on the throttle all the time? The throttle likes to back out during climbs, especially just after take off. You could have to make a quick throttle adjustment in the pattern on base. And most importantly, the need may arise for a go-around during a landing. That’s not the time to accidentally try to push in the mixture because you can’t find the throttle.

Inadequate use of rudder. As you’re learning to fly or teaching someone who’s just starting their training. you’ve got to start the habit of good rudder use right away. Even if you’re training in a Cessna 150 where the rudder requirements during climb are almost nonexistent, you must practice the use of rudder. One day you’ll move into a bigger plane and wish you had. If you can habitually force yourself or somehow convince your students to correlate right rudder with climbs and rudder with turns, then you will save yourself so much frustration down the road. For some reason, the right rudder during climb is the one that gets left out the most. If you’re a student, I challenge you to use your right rudder every time you climb and every time you turn, all on your own without your instructor asking. Your instructor will be so impressed he won’t know what to do with himself.

Not paying attention to airspeed. This one mostly affects the new students with less than about 10 hours, but is still a habit to pay special attention to whether you’re a seasoned pilot or a new student. Airspeed is your friend, especially in the traffic pattern. And for every flap and throttle setting, there’s a pitch attitude you should be able to memorize that will give you a specific airspeed. I’m a big fan of just going ahead and memorizing the Vy climb pitch attitude and the descent to landing pitch attitudes. If you have those memorized and you check your airspeed every now and then, it will keep you alive. What we don’t want is to hear the stall horn going off on the turn from upwind to crosswind or base to final. So, pay special attention to the pitch attitudes that give you your desired airspeeds and you’ll quickly learn to keep that airspeed right on target. One mistake pilots often make is chasing the airspeed indicator. This will cause a yo-yo affect with your pitch attitude as you constantly pitch up and down to chase the airspeed needle. Just set your pitch and average out your airspeed for a nice smooth descent that will be sure to impress any flight instructor. I know 300 hour pilots that still haven’t gotten the hang of that one.