Maneuver teaching: the four-part cycle

What this lesson is for: learning the four-part cycle that every remaining flight lesson in this program runs to. You will teach the four fundamentals of flight, fly them while talking, watch somebody else fly them badly, and say something useful about it.

The maneuver is easy on purpose. You have flown the four fundamentals to commercial tolerance since lesson 23. Everything hard about today is the teaching.

This lesson is recorded. See below.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation IV, task AI.IV.A, in full. This is the task your brief is graded against.
• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation VIII, all four tasks.
• standards/MANEUVER-LESSON-SHAPE.md, the four-part cycle and addition 2.
• FAA-H-8083-9B chapter 5, demonstration and performance.

Deliverable: Write the preflight ground lesson you will teach on the four fundamentals, to the template in standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md, covering all seven items of the brief. Bring it on paper. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering a fundamental of flight. Bring the tolerances written down, from the ACS, not from memory.

Every flight lesson from here to the checkride runs these four, in this order.

1. Brief. You teach the preflight ground lesson on the maneuver. This is graded. It is a separate ACS task from flying the maneuver, and you can pass one and fail the other.
2. Demonstrate. You fly the maneuver from the right seat, narrating it the way you would for somebody seeing it for the first time.
3. Talk through. Your instructor flies it as a Student, badly, on purpose. You talk them through it and fix what goes wrong.
4. Critique and debrief. You critique their flying. Then you critique your own teaching. Then you hear theirs.

Part 3 is the new one. You have flown a lot and been taught a lot. You have probably never had to watch somebody else fly badly, in an airplane you are responsible for, and produce one useful sentence at the moment it would still help.

1. The four-part cycle, and how the rest of this phase runs.
2. What AI.IV.A tests, and why your brief is graded rather than being a warm-up.
3. The seven items of a preflight ground lesson on a maneuver.
4. Demonstrating while narrating.
5. Talking a Student through a maneuver they are flying badly.
6. Positive exchange of controls, both directions.
7. The four fundamentals, as something you teach rather than something you fly.
8. Critiquing somebody else's flying.

1. Teach your preflight ground lesson on the four fundamentals, all seven items.
2. Demonstrate the four fundamentals from the right seat while narrating.
3. Talk your instructor through the same four while they fly them.
4. Take the airplane when the threshold is reached, out loud, whether or not it is offered.
5. Critique their flying: what happened, why, and what to do differently.
6. Critique your own teaching before you hear anyone else's.

Out loud, three ways, both directions, every single time:

"You have the flight controls." "I have the flight controls." "You have the flight controls."

At some point today the airplane will not be offered to you. You will have to take it. That is deliberate, it happens in every phase 3 lesson, and it is the part of US-5.4 that cannot be learned by reading about it.

Two ways this goes wrong, both common:

• Taking it silently. The other pilot does not let go, you both fly, and in a flare that is how airplanes get bent.
• Announcing it and then waiting. The exchange is a statement, not a request. If they do not let go, say it again, louder, and take it.

1. You deliver the preflight ground lesson on the four fundamentals, covering all seven items of the brief including the safety brief and the exchange of controls briefing, and answer two Student questions without reading from notes.
2. You fly the four fundamentals to commercial pilot tolerances from the right seat while narrating continuously, and do not go silent through any roll-in, level-off, or configuration change.
3. You talk the Simulated Student through each of the four fundamentals, and name the cause rather than only the deviation on at least four of the errors flown.
4. You take the flight controls using the three-way exchange, out loud, in both directions, including at least once when the airplane was not offered.
5. You deliver a critique of the Simulated Student's flying that names the error, its probable cause, and the correction, for at least two errors.
6. You deliver a self-critique of your own teaching before hearing the instructor's.

Falling short does not block lesson 26. There is no proficiency gate. It triggers the visibility rule in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md. This lesson is the baseline the rest of phase 3 is read against, so if today is a struggle you will hear that plainly and it is worth acting on early.

• A brief with no safety brief and no exchange briefing. Those are two of the seven items and they are the two that get dropped when you are nervous. They also fail the element on their own.
• Narrating the instruments instead of the actions. Nobody can act on "we are at 2,300 ft".
• Going quiet through the roll-in, which is exactly when the Student most needs to hear you. This is lesson 26's whole subject and it starts today.
• Fixing the deviation instead of naming the cause. "Level the nose" fixes this minute. "You are trimmed nose-down" fixes the flight.
• Talking non-stop. Silence after an instruction is part of the instruction. Give them room to fly.
• Teaching the maneuver you would fly rather than the one a Student can fly.

• Airspeed reaches 1.2 Vs1 in any configuration without correction applied.
• Bank exceeds 60 degrees at any time.
• Altitude passes 1,500 ft AGL descending during an air work maneuver.
• Deviation below 300 ft AGL on approach not corrected within two seconds.
• You are head-down inside the cockpit while a traffic conflict develops.
• Either of us is unclear about who is flying the airplane.

Hard floor: all air work is terminated by 1,500 ft AGL. That is North Aero policy and it is above the regulatory minimum on purpose.

Positive exchange of controls, both directions, every time.

Three slots, all currently empty: VS-25-1 Exemplar on AI.VIII.B, VS-25-2 and VS-25-3 Errors on AI.VIII.B and AI.VIII.C.

This lesson is complete and deliverable whether or not its Video Slots are filled.

This flight is recorded, and it is one of four in phase 3 that are. It is the baseline: lesson 38's recording gets compared against it, which is the point of doing it now rather than later.

You watch it and critique your own teaching before your instructor reviews it. The written assessment is the record. The footage is deleted after 30 days.

The camera changes nothing about when I take the airplane. The threshold above is the threshold.