Ground reference maneuvers

What this lesson is for: teaching the rectangular course, S-turns across a road, and turns around a point from the right seat, and being able to explain wind drift to somebody who has never thought about it.

This is the first lesson where the maneuver itself is the hard part of the teaching. Lessons 25 and 26 used flying you could do without thinking. Here, a Student's misunderstanding is genuinely hard to name, because they can see the ground out the window and draw the wrong conclusion from it.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, task AI.IX.E, in full. Write down the tolerances and the entry altitude band.
• FAA-H-8083-3C, the ground reference maneuvers chapter.
• standards/MANEUVER-LESSON-SHAPE.md, addition 2, the seven items of the brief.
• The current forecast wind for the practice area, on the morning of the lesson.

Deliverable: Write the preflight ground lesson you will teach on the ground reference maneuvers. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering the ground reference cluster. Include one explanation of wind drift correction that a Student could use to predict what the airplane will do in the next turn, in under sixty seconds, without a diagram.

A ground reference lesson in dead calm teaches nearly nothing. If the wind is not usable we will either wait or swap this lesson with another one in the phase. That is not a delay, it is the lesson working as intended.

1. Wind drift, explained so a Student can predict it rather than react to it.
2. The rectangular course, which is a traffic pattern with the runway taken away.
3. S-turns across a road, where the symmetry is the visible measure of your correction.
4. Turns around a point, where the bank never stops changing.
5. Entry: downwind, at the ACS altitude, cleared and configured.
6. Division of attention at low altitude, and what a Student stops doing.
7. Where the airplane would land, continuously, all the way through.
8. Teaching a maneuver whose reference is outside the airplane.

A Student flying turns around a point will lock onto the point. Their scan stops. The airspeed decays in the steepest part of the turn, and often the altitude climbs while they are busy looking at the ground.

That is not three errors. It is one error with three symptoms, and the error is the scan.

"Watch your airspeed" treats the symptom. You will be graded on naming the cause first.

1. Teach your preflight ground lesson on the ground reference maneuvers.
2. Demonstrate a rectangular course, S-turns, and turns around a point from the right seat, narrating throughout.
3. Talk your instructor through all three while they fly them badly.
4. Keep saying where the airplane would land if the engine stopped.
5. Take the airplane at the threshold, out loud, three-way.
6. Critique their flying, then your own teaching, then listen.

1. You deliver the preflight ground lesson on the ground reference maneuvers, covering all seven items of the brief, and explain wind drift correction in terms a Student can use to predict the next turn rather than to describe the last one.
2. You fly a rectangular course, S-turns across a road, and turns around a point to private pilot tolerances from the right seat while narrating continuously, at the entry altitude the current AI.IX.E task specifies, with no silence longer than five seconds.
3. You talk the Simulated Student through each of the three maneuvers, and on the fixation error name the interrupted scan before naming the airspeed or the altitude.
4. You state where the airplane would land at least twice during the low-altitude work, unprompted, and teach it as part of the maneuver rather than as a separate item.
5. 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.
6. You deliver a critique naming the error, its probable cause, and the correction for at least two of the errors flown.
7. You deliver a self-critique before hearing the instructor's.

Falling short does not block lesson 28. No proficiency gate. It triggers the visibility rule in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md.

• Teaching bank as a number. A Student taught "about 30 degrees" will fly one wind correctly and every other wind wrong. Bank answers to groundspeed.
• Entering upwind, or entering without clearing turns. Both are brief items, and skipping the clearing turns fails the safety brief on its own.
• Explaining drift with a diagram they cannot use in the airplane.
• Fixing the airspeed and never mentioning the scan. See above. This is the lesson.
• Your own scan going while you concentrate on their flying. You are responsible for this airplane, at low altitude, and this is on the intervention list.
• Altitude creeping in turns around a point while everybody watches the ground.
• Going quiet through the steepest part of the turn, which is the busiest part.
• Doing the emergency landing area once and calling it done. It is continuous or it is not a habit.

• Altitude passes 500 ft AGL descending, at any point in any maneuver.
• Airspeed reaches 1.2 Vs1 in any configuration without correction applied.
• Bank exceeds 45 degrees during any ground reference maneuver.
• Neither of us has looked outside for a full turn.
• The airplane is somewhere a power failure would leave no landing option, and it is not corrected immediately.
• Either of us is unclear about who is flying the airplane.

Hard floor: 500 ft AGL. Lower than the rest of phase 3, because these maneuvers are flown lower. North Aero policy, not regulation.

The bank limit is tighter here too. 45 degrees at 700 ft AGL with decaying airspeed is the accident this maneuver produces, and it is worth knowing that is what the number is for.

Positive exchange of controls, both directions, every time.

Three slots, all currently empty: VS-27-1 Exemplar and VS-27-2, VS-27-3 Errors, all tagged AI.IX.E.

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