Tips to Teaching Student Pilots of Airplanes Recovery From Unusual Attitudes

As a flight instructor I recently gained some great tips on effectively teaching student pilots how to recover from an unusual attitude.

An unusual attitude can easily be created by a student or inexperienced pilot who for whatever reason is not paying attention to his instruments (often in poor visibility conditions) and gets into generally one of two positions. Either they inadvertently enter a climb that will eventually lead to a stall or spin, OR they enter a dive that will eventually cause them and their airplane to be used as earth moving equipment. We know it to be a bad idea to try to move mountains or earth with airplanes.

Recently I was flying with my chief flight instructor as he was conducting an Instrument Proficiency Check (IPC) for me. Any instrument rated pilot who does not fly at least 6 instrument approaches under simulated or actual instrument conditions in a 6 month period has to undergo one of these checks with a flight instructor who is current, in order to gain their currency back.

During part of the check it was necessary for me to do some partial panel work in which my chief covered some of the instruments to see if I was still able to fly an approach this way as well as recover from a couple unusual attitudes he placed me in. This is an expected part of this flight check.

When my chief did this he told me to use only the airspeed indicator (ASI) and the turn coordinator for the unusual attitude recovery. I had never been taught it this way. I always had the attitude indicator and the heading indicator to look at as well. Mistakenly until then I had thought that it was the vertical speed indicator (VSI) I was to look at in order to see when we were level again. If you do this you will quickly be a smoking hole in the ground as the VSI lags reality by 7 or 8 seconds. I learned from my chief that it was the ASI I was to look at.

So when you first teach unusual attitude recovery to your new private pilot students allow them to keep the hood (a view limiting device to simulate them being in actual instrument conditions) off while at the same time you demonstrate how they are to recover from this. They will see how, as the airspeed reverses either direction, i.e. goes from decreasing to increasing or vice-versa, that at that very moment the aircraft is level with the horizon.

Using the turn coordinator they can see if the wings are level or in a bank. It follows then that if the ASI shows the speed to be increasing, power should be reduce and if it is decreasing the yoke should be pushed forward and the power increased.

Once a student has seen this a few times to convince them of the validity of the ASI as telling them the aircraft is level they can do the recovery while under the hood using only this and the turn coordinator for the initial recovery.

I have seen this help students easily master this exercise.