Aircraft flight controls and operation of systems

What this lesson is for: teaching the systems of the airplane you will actually instruct in, so that a student knows what a failure looks like from their seat and what to do about it.

The order matters. Indication first, then action, then mechanism if it helps. Most candidates teach it backwards, starting with a schematic, because that is how they were taught.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation II, Task E.
• The flight manual for the airplane you will instruct in. The systems section, all of it.
• FAA-H-8083-25C, the systems chapter, plus the October 2025 addendum.
• FAA-H-8083-15B Addendum, April 2015, on angle of attack indicators. Four pages. Yes, it is an addendum to the Instrument Flying Handbook; that is where the FAA put it.
• Find out whether the airplane you instruct in has an angle of attack indicator. If it does, bring its limitations from that airplane's own approved material. If it does not, say so.

Deliverable: Pick one system in that airplane. On one page write: what it does, what a failure looks like from the seat, what the pilot does, and where in the flight manual a student would find that. Do not copy any number out of the manual. Cite where it is instead. You will do this for the rest of your career and the habit starts here.

Second deliverable. Write the ground lesson you would teach on aircraft flight controls and the operation of systems, to the template in standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md, in your own words. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering the systems, performance, or weight and balance cluster. Bring it on paper.

You have already written most of this. Turn your one-page system write-up into a lesson plan: same content, arranged so that somebody else could teach from it.

1. Primary and secondary flight controls, and trim.
2. Powerplant, propeller, and induction.
3. Fuel system, including the selector and unusable fuel.
4. Electrical system, and what you lose when it fails.
5. Pitot-static and vacuum, and which instruments each failure takes with it.
6. Landing gear, brakes, and steering.
7. What abnormalities and failures look like, and what to do.
8. How to teach a system: indication, action, then mechanism.
9. You teach.

Teach an assigned system for about ten minutes, from the flight manual of the airplane you will instruct in, to a Simulated Student who keeps asking what they would actually see.

1. You teach an assigned system for about ten minutes, working from the actual airplane's approved material.
2. You state what a failure of that system looks like from the pilot's seat, in terms of indications rather than causes.
3. You state the action a student should take, and where they would find it.
4. You direct the Simulated Student to the flight manual rather than quoting a number from memory.
5. You teach indication before mechanism, or explain why mechanism came first.
6. You state what an angle of attack indicator measures and two of its limitations, and say whether the airplane you instruct in has one, and can say that the FAA's guidance to teach this is guidance rather than regulation.
7. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Teaching the schematic as though it were the subject. Your student will never see the schematic. They will see a gauge doing something odd.
• Quoting a capacity or a figure from memory. Send them to the book. In this program you never reproduce a number from a flight manual.
• Teaching a generic airplane instead of the one on the ramp.
• Describing failures by cause. "The vacuum pump fails" is a cause. What does the student see?
• Skipping the electrical system because it feels dull. Its failure is the least obvious one in the airplane, which makes it the most worth teaching well.

Not applicable. Ground lesson.

This lesson has no Video Slots.