AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2020 - 90

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ON INSTRUMENTS

Basic attitude
flying
The prime skill for IFR flying
BY THOMAS A. HORNE

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WHAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT instrument flying skill? That's easy-it's the skill
emphasized from the very beginning of
your training for the instrument rating:
basic attitude instrument flying, or BAI as
it's sometimes abbreviated. It's maintaining airplane control by hand-flying without
any visual references to the world outside
the cockpit. All the other flying skills such
as navigation, communication, or systems
management blanch in importance.
Flying solely by reference to instruments means mastering several new
ways of seeing, visualizing, interpreting,
and acting upon instrument indications.
That means developing a good scan pattern. For starters it's helpful to group the
instruments according to the information
they provide. The instruments giving pitch
information include the attitude indicator,
airspeed indicator, altimeter, and vertical speed indicator. For bank information

there's the attitude indicator, heading indicator, and turn coordinator (or turn and
bank indicator, if you're flying an older
airplane). For power, the tachometer and
manifold pressure gauges give a good idea
of engine parameters.
Depending on the phase of flight, certain instruments are considered primary in
importance. For pitch, the altimeter gives
the best source of information in straight
and level flight; for bank, the heading indicator gets the prize. The other instruments
give secondary information that can be
used for comparison, confirming that the
airplane is doing what you want it to do.
The term "control and performance" is
another way of describing flight on instruments. This simply means that you fly so
as to create the conditions you'll need for
a certain phase of flight. Ideally you've
determined those combinations of conditions during your training. For example, for

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160
AIRSPEED

140

100

6
3
N

S 21
24

W 30

2 MIN

E 12

TURN COORDINATOR

25
20

100 FEET PER MIN

15 rpm20
x100

25
30

VERTICAL SPEED

IN Hg

15
15

MANIFOLD
PRESSURE

40
45

WITH THE TRADITIONAL ROUND GAUGE, or "six-pack" setup, information is spread out among
the six fundamental flight instruments and the power gauges. The attitude indicator is
front and center, and serves as a home base for the scan. To prevent fixation on any one
instrument pilots should shuttle their focus between the attitude indicator and the other
gauges.

90 | AOPA PILOT May 2020

CHARLES FLOYD

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120

KNOTS

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - May 2020

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