Right-seat introduction

What this lesson is for: flying the airplane from the right seat until the seat stops taking up attention. This is your first flight of the program.

You will not teach anything in this lesson. No narrating, no demonstrating, no explaining what you are doing. That comes at lesson 26, and mixing it in here makes both harder. Today you are a pilot in an unfamiliar seat, and that is the whole job.

Nine ground lessons is enough. Twenty-five would be too many. A pilot who does not fly for two months does not come back sharper, and the ordering of this program exists partly to stop that happening to you.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation V Tasks A to D and F, Area VI, Area VII Tasks A and B, Area VIII.
• FAA-H-8083-3C, Airplane Flying Handbook, the chapters on basic maneuvers and on takeoffs and landings, plus the October 2025 addendum.
• The flight manual for the airplane you will fly. Speeds and configurations come from the book in that airplane, not from a handout.

Deliverable: Written, one page. List every action in a normal takeoff and landing that you perform with a specific hand, and say which hand you will use from the right seat. Then list the three places you expect this to feel wrong. Bring it. We will check it against what actually happened, which is usually the interesting part.

1. What actually changes in the right seat, and what does not.
2. Preflight, flight deck management, and engine start from the right seat.
3. Taxiing, airport signs, and lighting.
4. The before-takeoff check.
5. Communications, light signals, and traffic patterns.
6. Sight picture. On the runway, in the pattern, and in the flare.
7. Control handling. Left hand on the yoke, right hand on the throttle.
8. Traffic scan, and where your blind spots have moved to.
9. Fundamentals of flight from the right seat.
10. Normal takeoffs and landings from the right seat.

• Preflight, start, taxi, and run up, all from the right seat.
• Fly straight and level, turns, climbs, and descents to private standards.
• Fly at least three normal takeoffs and landings.
• Keep a scan that covers the blind spots you did not used to have.

The standard is right-seat solo-equivalent competence at private pilot standards. In plain terms: if your instructor were not in the airplane, could you safely fly it from that seat?

1. You conduct the preflight, engine start, taxi, and before-takeoff check from the right seat, unprompted, in the correct sequence.
2. You fly straight and level, turns, climbs, and descents to private pilot standards from the right seat.
3. You complete at least three normal takeoffs and landings from the right seat to private pilot standards, with a safe touchdown in the touchdown zone.
4. You maintain a traffic scan covering the right-seat blind spots, shown by calling at least one traffic sighting or one deliberate clearing turn before each maneuver.
5. You manage the throttle with the correct hand without reaching across, throughout.
6. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

You start lesson 11 anyway. This program has no proficiency gate.

What happens instead is that extra right-seat work gets recorded as extra work, with its own hours, so that you can see what it is costing and why. That rule is in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md.

This is the lesson most likely to need extra work, especially if you have a lot of total time and almost no right-seat time. That is expected and it is not a mark against you. Say so early rather than pushing through it.

• You will flare high. Probably on the first two landings. The sight picture sits differently from over here and your eyes have twenty years of the other one. This is the single most predictable thing in this lesson.
• Drifting right on the takeoff roll, because the visual reference you have always used is now in the wrong place.
• Reaching across for the throttle. Catch this today. It sets fast.
• Your left hand feeling clumsy on the yoke. It is clumsy. Repetition fixes it; trying harder does not.
• Starting to narrate. You know it is coming and the instinct is to get ahead. Resist it.
• Scanning the sectors you always scanned. Your blind spots moved when you did.
• Concluding from a bad landing that you will be a bad instructor. Different skills. A high-time pilot flaring high from an unfamiliar seat is a normal Tuesday.

Stated in advance so it is never a surprise. Your instructor takes the airplane when:

• You go below 300 ft AGL on approach and do not correct within two seconds.
• Any drift toward the runway edge on takeoff roll is not arrested immediately.
• Airspeed drops below 1.1 Vso on final without correction being applied.
• Bank angle exceeds 45 degrees in the pattern.
• Your attention is inside the cockpit in the pattern while a traffic conflict is developing.

Positive exchange of controls, every time, both directions. "My controls", "your controls", "my controls". You will practise it today. Every flight lesson after this one assumes you have it.

Two Video Slots, both currently empty: an exemplar right-seat landing and one flared high, filmed so the sight picture is visible. This lesson is complete and deliverable with both slots empty, and they are empty today.