Fundamentals of flight from the right seat

What this lesson is for: flying the four fundamentals to commercial tolerances from the right seat. Lessons 10 and 13 were private standards. This one moves the bar.

This is your last flight of phase 2 and the handover into maneuver teaching.

Still no teaching. Narration starts at lesson 26, and this is the last time anyone will have to tell you that.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation VIII, all four tasks. Note the tolerances.
• FAA-H-8083-3C, the basic maneuvers chapter, plus the October 2025 addendum.
• Your lesson 13 debrief.

Deliverable: Write down the commercial tolerances for altitude, heading, and airspeed for the four fundamentals. Then write, in one sentence, which of the four you expect to be hardest from the right seat, and why.

1. Where you are after lessons 10 and 13, and what phase 3 is going to ask of you.
2. Straight-and-level flight at commercial tolerance.
3. Level turns, including steeper bank.
4. Straight climbs and climbing turns.
5. Straight descents and descending turns.
6. Trim. More important than it sounds. See below.
7. More takeoffs and landings.

A pilot who trims properly can let go of the yoke. That is what makes it possible, later, to point at something, look across at your student, and keep flying the airplane at the same time.

A pilot who flies with pressure held can do it for ten minutes and then gets tired, and their flying gets worse in the second half of every lesson they teach.

You will be asked to fly hands-off, briefly, in three configurations.

1. You fly straight-and-level, level turns, climbs and climbing turns, and descents and descending turns to commercial pilot tolerances, from the right seat.
2. You fly hands-off briefly in level flight, a climb, and a descent, demonstrating trim.
3. You complete at least four takeoffs and landings to commercial tolerances.
4. You maintain a traffic scan appropriate to the right seat throughout.
5. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

Falling short does not block phase 3. No proficiency gate. It triggers the visibility rule in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md.

Phase 3 adds narration on top of this flying. Talking while flying takes about as much spare capacity as flying slightly sloppily is already using.

So if you are working hard to hold commercial tolerance today, you will go quiet at lesson 26 when the workload rises. That is not a character flaw, it is arithmetic, and it is exactly the failure mode lesson 26 exists to address.

Which is why it is worth being genuinely comfortable here rather than just inside tolerance. Say so if you are not. Extra work now is much cheaper than extra work later.

• Flying to private tolerances out of habit. The numbers moved. Know them before you fly.
• Holding pressure instead of trimming. It will cost you at lesson 26.
• Altitude wandering as the bank steepens.
• Descending on power alone, or on pitch alone.
• Scan degrading as you get busier. That is a preview of phase 3, and worth noticing now.

• Below 300 ft AGL on approach without correction within two seconds.
• Drift toward the runway edge on takeoff roll not arrested immediately.
• Airspeed below 1.1 Vso on final without correction applied.
• Bank exceeding 45 degrees in the pattern.
• Attention inside the cockpit in the pattern while traffic is developing.

Positive exchange of controls, both directions, every time.

Uses the two slots from lesson 10, both currently empty. This lesson is complete and deliverable with them empty.