"Attitudes of Flight"

During your flight training you should have been introduced to attitude flying. That is, you should have learned that a certain attitude and power setting will give you a certain performance. Whether it's a climb at a particular rate, a cruise speed or whatever the lesson should be clear. Setting an attitude along with a power setting will give you something fairly predictable.

I've been noticing that some pilots will place the airplane in a very steep up or down pitch attitude chasing an airspeed or deviation in altitude. The attitude they have selected is not possible to maintain before either a stall occurs or on the other nose down case we are into the yellow arc. Pilot's who aren't aware of the "Attitudes of Flight" typically are not smooth in their control inputs because they are bracketing airspeed, altitude etc. without knowing what the end limits are. For example, if you didn't know much about flying and I told you to climb at an airspeed of 60 knots in a Cessna 172 you might start pulling back on the control wheel. This would definitely cause the airspeed to go down. If we started this from cruise flight at say 120 knots you may just keep pulling on the control wheel until the airplane became vertical. You'd get 60 knots alright, but soon you'd be stalled because the attitude and power setting were not possible to sustain. In the case of the pilot who understands the attitudes of flight, that pilot would raise the nose of the airplane to a predetermined attitude and apply power. The airspeed would begin to decrease and eventually settle near 60 knots in a sustainable attitude.

I find that pilots who use EFIS (Glass Cockpits) are the most likely not to understand the attitudes of flight. This is because the big display screams "stare at me", as it's really quite a colorful and interesting thing to look at. I mean that nicely. I think the G1000 is very cool to look at. Not stare at, but look at.

Anyway, the fix for all of this is to fly without the use of attitude indicators and EFIS for a while. Develop a sense for what attitudes are sustainable and desirable for the main realms of flight you mostly do...climbs, descents, cruise, etc. You'll not only smooth out your flying, you'll also see an unusual attitude coming way before it gets out of hand....