This might get interesting.....

On final approach do you adjust

  • Pitch for airspeed, power for glide slope

  • Pitch for glide slope, power for speed.

  • I go where the wind takes me

  • Who cares?

  • Other

Results are only viewable after voting.
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PaulS

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PaulS
Or maybe not. When you are hand flying final approach do you pitch for airspeed, power for glideslope or power for airspeed and pitch for glideslope?

For you pedantically burdened folks, yes they are interrelated, try to overlook that for this poll.
 
Practically speaking, I know which works. I’d be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise.
 
I use the Ronco Rotisserie Method for power..."set it and forget it", so, "other".

The autopilot with autothrottles pitches for glideslope as well.
 
I'm in a power off glide once I pass the end of the runway on downwind. I fly the airplane (S-turns, slips, flaps, best glide speed, whatever) to hit the intended touchdown point.
 
MauleSkinner said:
None worth noting. ;)
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I had a landing while in Scottsdale last week, about 3 knots wind down the peapod on final, I didn't know what to do with myself. It finally turned about 45 degrees on flare and I had to land on one wheel, for about 1/2 a second. First greaser I've had in a long time.
 
Collective (power) for glideslope, cyclic (pitch) for speed. With auto pilot, it’s the opposite. ;)
 
PaulS said:
I had a landing while in Scottsdale last week, about 3 knots wind down the peapod on final, I didn't know what to do with myself. It finally turned about 45 degrees on flare and I had to land on one wheel, for about 1/2 a second. First greaser I've had in a long time.
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You do realize that's in excess of 2 knots crosswind component. :eek:

You're a wild man!
 
Based on the results I'm gonna assume most of the responses aren't about going below the Glideslope on an ILS. Ya gotta arrest the descent NOW. Throttle takes to long. I'm talkin bugsmashers. May be different fer like fighters and stuff. Maybe a little goose of the afterburner works:)
 
So I learned pitch for airspeed, power for staying on the glide path. For my instrument rating, I was told to switch that around. Power for speed, pitch to stay on the glidepath. It took a little while to relearn, but I'll have to say, I prefer my new method, which is basically point the nose at the aim spot, adjust power for airspeed. For those of us without auto throttles, but capable autopilots, the autopilot keeps us on the glide path, the throttle manages speed, so coupled and uncoupled approaches are basically the same.
 
PaulS said:
So I learned pitch for airspeed, power for staying on the glide path. For my instrument rating, I was told to switch that around. Power for speed, pitch to stay on the glidepath. It took a little while to relearn, but I'll have to say, I prefer my new method, which is basically point the nose at the aim spot, adjust power for airspeed. For those of us without auto throttles, but capable autopilots, the autopilot keeps us on the glide path, the throttle manages speed, so coupled and uncoupled approaches are basically the same.
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It depends on where you are on the power curve. Each has its place. The problem is that CFIs repeat pitch for airspeed/power for altitude without understanding it and when pilots try to apply it they get confused. It only works when flying on the backside, or close to it.
 
PaulS said:
So I learned pitch for airspeed, power for staying on the glide path. For my instrument rating, I was told to switch that around. Power for speed, pitch to stay on the glidepath. It took a little while to relearn, but I'll have to say, I prefer my new method, which is basically point the nose at the aim spot, adjust power for airspeed. For those of us without auto throttles, but capable autopilots, the autopilot keeps us on the glide path, the throttle manages speed, so coupled and uncoupled approaches are basically the same.
Click to expand...

The pitch for airspeed, power for altitude thing has it’s place in Primary training. It’s important to get it set in the students that you don’t just pull back on the stick because the ground is coming up faster than you want it. That leads to stall/spins. What’s the old saying? Everything you need to know about aerodynamics: push stick forward, houses get bigger, pull stick back, houses get smaller, keep pulling back, houses get bigger again.
 
I'm pretty sure CFIs understand that pitch and power both affect airspeed and descent rate.

The reason student pilots are taught to pitch for airspeed isn't because it is a hard rule and must be done that way, but because it's not intuitive and it's a necessary part of learning to handle the airplane. The beginner student either thinks you have to point the nose way down at the ground in order to descend or way up in the air to climb. Both are wrong. They also have a tendency to get ground shyness during approach and subconsciously pull back on the elevator.

In addition, airspeed is more important on a visual descent with glidepath angle secondary, while on an ILS, the exact glideslope must be maintained.
 
I was taught pitch + power = performance. In my silly head there is no differentiation... I just adjust as necessary to get the performance I need. Pitch and power are coupled. Because of a wonderful woman that was really smart, a dang good pilot and an even better instructor I have never had the idea that it was not coupled.
So for me if I’m not getting the performance I want, I assess the situation and adjust as necessary. Sometimes it’s pitch, sometimes power and sometimes both. Just depends. I don’t even think about it anymore. I just fly. Because of the way Sara taught me it was like that by the time she endorsed me for the private. Has served me very well for over 20 years now.
 
‘Power plus Attitude equals Performance’. That the answer in a nutshell, right from the Naval Aviators Flight Manual. I’ll go with a combination of pitch & power.

Doing ‘whatever it takes’ fits in too.
 
Cooter said:
It depends on where you are on the power curve. Each has its place. The problem is that CFIs repeat pitch for airspeed/power for altitude without understanding it and when pilots try to apply it they get confused. It only works when flying on the backside, or close to it.
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Less to do with the power curve, more to do with stable flight. If you are trimmed for a specific angle of attack/airspeed, then adding/removing power will cause a climb/descent accordingly. Its why you can be in cruise and initiate a climb just by adding power (on the "normal" side of the power curve) or initiate your descent just by reducing power (again on the "normal" side of the power curve). It helps to do a basic physics lesson on the relationship between force, acceleration, velocity and overall energy management (potential vs kinetic energy and how to trade one for the other) and then relate them to the 4 forces of flight with altitude to understand exactly what's going on...

Power + attitude = Performance is really nothing more than "when the forces (power) acting on the plane are in balance, the aircraft will fly the set pitch (attitude) at a constant speed without accelerating or decelerating (performance).


Personally, I find pitch for airspeed power for altitude to work fairly well on approaches but because of the lag between the change in power and the change in altitude/glideslope its not perfect, especially when factoring in the less than perfect skill with which power is changed and the lag between a change occuring and mentally registering the change and deciding a corrective action. In most of the planes I fly, I find I can easily trade +/-15 knots from my approach speed and still be at or below Vfe and at least 1.6x Vs0 so I typically will use small pitch adjustments that I apply manually to maintain glideslope while the engine (and my brain) catches up. The difficult part is not to fall into the trap of making such trade-offs on short final but that's where stable approach criteria comes in and since you should have the runway environment in sight, deviations from the glideslope are less critical as long as they are handled/corrected and not allowed to grow worse.

I imagine in a larger turbine propulsion aircraft that this manual methodology is less successful since it can take even longer for changes in power to result in changes in thrust and the mental processing time is reduced even further thanks to the speed of the aircraft but there is a reason these aircraft are normally flown on a coupled approach.
 
Other: Its important to know the power setting that will give the desired descent rate at the desired forward speed. So, set the power to that value and pitch to get the correct descent rate. The airspeed should take care of itself. Don't mess with the power unless you are significantly off the glideslope.
 
It's maybe both simpler and more complicated the way I trained. The coarse adjustment is pitch for airspeed and power for altitude, that is, setting the "numbers" for a typical ILS or LPV descent. But the fine adjustment on final is pitch to stay on the glideslope and power to control airspeed, although power adjustments are typically less frequent flying the descent. That switch in thinking took time to get used to, but it works well. Pitch corrections are quicker to make small adjustments in glidepath than power, even in a little FLIB.
 
apr911 said:
Less to do with the power curve, more to do with stable flight. If you are trimmed for a specific angle of attack/airspeed, then adding/removing power will cause a climb/descent accordingly. Its why you can be in cruise and initiate a climb just by adding power (on the "normal" side of the power curve) or initiate your descent just by reducing power (again on the "normal" side of the power curve). It helps to do a basic physics lesson on the relationship between force, acceleration, velocity and overall energy management (potential vs kinetic energy and how to trade one for the other) and then relate them to the 4 forces of flight with altitude to understand exactly what's going on...

Power + attitude = Performance is really nothing more than "when the forces (power) acting on the plane are in balance, the aircraft will fly the set pitch (attitude) at a constant speed without accelerating or decelerating (performance).


Personally, I find pitch for airspeed power for altitude to work fairly well on approaches but because of the lag between the change in power and the change in altitude/glideslope its not perfect, especially when factoring in the less than perfect skill with which power is changed and the lag between a change occuring and mentally registering the change and deciding a corrective action. In most of the planes I fly, I find I can easily trade +/-15 knots from my approach speed and still be at or below Vfe and at least 1.6x Vs0 so I typically will use small pitch adjustments that I apply manually to maintain glideslope while the engine (and my brain) catches up. The difficult part is not to fall into the trap of making such trade-offs on short final but that's where stable approach criteria comes in and since you should have the runway environment in sight, deviations from the glideslope are less critical as long as they are handled/corrected and not allowed to grow worse.

I imagine in a larger turbine propulsion aircraft that this manual methodology is less successful since it can take even longer for changes in power to result in changes in thrust and the mental processing time is reduced even further thanks to the speed of the aircraft but there is a reason these aircraft are normally flown on a coupled approach.
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Front-side vs backside applies to turbine aircraft as well as pistons. I’ve done it in aircraft 12,000-300,000+lbs. The principles are the same. It’s two different techniques although backside flying often describes flying done just on the frontside of the curve. The delay you mention from input to response is the difference. Go watch some @motoadve or STOL videos and you’ll see the difference excess energy has on approach technique. Or, look at some Navy carrier landings and you’ll see that all glide slope changes are through power inputs (except auto-throttles, DLC, and whatever magic carpet does). The speed stays the same, even when correcting glide-slope.
 
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Power controls how much energy you have. Pitch controls how that energy is divided between altitude and airspeed.

(read: This is one of the dumbest arguments in aviation. It's neither.)
 
Depends. Am I inverted?
 
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