6 Tips to Mastering Basic Flight Maneuvers

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, of course. 

For a big part of your flight training, learning to fly is broken into smaller, more management building blocks—individual flight maneuvers. 

You’ll learn a lot of them in your first few flight lessons, and for a while, most of your attention will be on mastering them. And, of course, you’ll be tested on them, too!

Here are six tips to help you study and master those basic flight maneuvers. 

Student Pilot Tips for Basic Flight Maneuvers

Some flight maneuvers you’ll need to know include:

• Steep turns
• Slow flight
• Stalls
• Turns around a point
• S-turns across a road
• Rectangular courses

These maneuvers help you understand how to fly the plane and, ultimately, how to tackle the most important flight maneuvers: approach and landing!

While each one of these maneuvers is different, there is a standard procedure for each. A procedure is nothing more than a list of steps to take.

The first steps to learning a new maneuver are understanding what you want to do and then memorizing the steps. The only part that involves the airplane is the actual doing it. 

If there’s one important lesson here, it is this: You should never learn a new maneuver in an airplane. By the time you’re flying it, you should have already studied that maneuver for a few hours on your own.

Study the Airplane Flying Handbook

The first thing you should realize is that all of the maneuvers are discussed in great detail in the FAA’s official flight training textbook, The Airplane Flying Handbook.

You do not need to know the whole book, though, since you won’t learn some maneuvers until you are working on your commercial pilot’s license.

The AFH is a great resource because it provides details that other books leave out.

It has a narrative description of the maneuver, a step-by-step checklist, graphic representations of what it looks like, and even common errors and how to fix them. 

Even if your flight school provides you with another maneuvers handbook, it’s worth reading the AFH at least once or twice. The Airplane Flying Handbook can be downloaded from the FAA website for free. 

Chair Fly to Memorize the Steps

It might seem at first like there isn’t much you can do to practice these maneuvers when you’re not in the cockpit, but in truth, you can do a lot to be prepared in advance. Start by spending some time with the book to understand the basics. Then, it’s time to memorize the steps and procedures that make up the maneuver. 

Each maneuver is nothing more than a list of steps you must complete. For many students, memorizing the steps and when to do them is the hardest part of learning the maneuver. 

Learn how to chair fly. Chair flying is simply practicing the maneuvers while visualizing (pretending) that you are sitting in the cockpit. It helps you remember what action you take with what hand, what you are looking for and expecting to happen, and what to do when that happens. 

Practice on a Simulator (ATD)

One step up from chair flying is using an aviation training device (ATD), like a simple flight simulator.

Many schools have Microsoft Flight Simulator or a similar program running on a computer where you can apply what you learned while chair flying.

The computer adds a layer of realism since the simulated aircraft will react like a real one. 

Remember to set the program to fly the aircraft most similar to your trainer. It doesn’t do much good to practice slow flight in a 747 (although it’s fun during your non-study time).

The best flight simulator setups are a reasonably accurate depiction of your trainer’s cockpit and performance. It is fairly easy to set up a flight simulator at home with a basic yoke, rudder pedals, and one of the best flight simulators, like Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane. 

Talk Through Each Step During Your Pre-Flight Briefing

Before each flight, you will have a few minutes dedicated to discussing the day’s activities and plans with your flight instructor, which is your pre-flight briefing.

During this time, you should be able to demonstrate how much you’ve studied by listing the steps you’ll take in the plane correctly.

Some instructors may make it a kind of oral quiz, while others may have you lead the conversation. Either way, the purpose is to double-check that what you’ve learned and memorized is the right thing.

This conversation should go both ways.

You should come to the flight lesson prepared by knowing what maneuvers you will work on that day. Your flight instructor helps by ensuring you’ve memorized the right things and nudging you toward what you need to keep working on.

Pay Attention When Your Instructor Demonstrates

Flight instructors generally want to see you fly and get you the most stick time possible. If they take the control to demonstrate something for you, it’s worth paying attention because it’s probably important.

Watch how they handle the controls, how the aircraft feels as they fly, and how it may look differently than when you do it.

How can you make your maneuver look exactly like theirs?

Pay attention to their pace and how they handle the controls—these are things you can’t get a feel for while on the ground.

This is not a time to express your individuality. Flying an airplane, especially when first learning, is about getting to the point where your maneuvers look like everyone else’s.

If you can make yours look just like your instructor’s demonstration, you’re on the path to breezing through your progress checks and checkride. 

Practice, Practice, and Practice Some More

Once your instructor is happy that you have the fundamentals of the maneuver down, it’s time to practice in the aircraft.

Every time you fly in the practice area, you should run through all the maneuvers you know once or twice. Your instructor may lead, or they may ask you which ones you want to work on.

Either way, it’s critical to polish each maneuver until you master it. 

You’ll demonstrate these maneuvers on each progress check and checkride you take. They are the most basic building blocks of learning to fly.

Proving that you can memorize a procedure and implement it in the cockpit—no matter how trivial—is a tested skill. 

The Airplane Flying Handbook and the Airman Certification Standards (ACS) list criteria for passing each maneuver. You should have a copy of the ACS since it is the document from which you will ultimately be tested. 

Bonus Tip: Don’t Try Anything New!

It may seem silly, but this is an important note: Don’t try anything new or different when practicing your maneuvers.

Your goal is to master it just the way you were taught. If you have a question about a different technique, something new you read, or something different you saw on YouTube, discuss it with your flight instructor before trying.

And, whatever you do, don’t make any changes on the day of a progress check or checkride! Just do it exactly like you’ve done with your instructor—nothing more and nothing less!

Ready to Fly? Don’t Forget Your Clearing Turns!

You’ve probably heard that the bookwork is the hardest part of flight training.

Many students fail to realize that there are actually two separate sets of books—the theory books, which help you study for the written exam, and the practical flying books, which help you prepare for the checkride.

All of these maneuvers fall into the latter category, meaning that there’s even bookwork to do for the flying part of the flying! 

That’s a lot of studying.

These tips might not sound fun, but if you apply them to your study process, you are guaranteed to notice a difference. Students who prepare for their flight lessons in this manner pick up the maneuvers faster and maximize their time in the plane, saving them a lot of time and money.