Slips and the power-off 180 accuracy landing

What this lesson is for: teaching the slip to a landing and the power-off 180 accuracy landing from the right seat, and being able to make energy management something a Student can see and act on rather than a phrase they nod at.

These two go together because both are about spending energy on purpose. The slip is how you get rid of energy you do not want. The power-off 180 is what happens when the energy you have is all the energy there is going to be.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, tasks AI.VII.M and AI.VII.O, in full. Write down the touchdown point tolerance for the power-off 180.
• FAA-H-8083-3C, the sections on slips and on the power-off accuracy approach.
• standards/MANEUVER-LESSON-SHAPE.md, addition 2.

Deliverable: Three things. First, write the preflight ground lesson you will teach on slips and the power-off 180. Second, find the slip limitations for the airplane you will fly, in that airplane's own approved material, and bring the page reference, not just the answer. Third, write the thirty-second explanation you will give a Student who asks how to tell whether they will reach the runway, with no glide ratio figure in it.

The power-off 180 is a commercial maneuver. It is also, in every way that matters, the engine-out approach flown to a runway, and the slip is the correction most often needed at the end of one.

Say that to your Student. It is the difference between a maneuver a commercial student endures and a skill a private student actually wants.

A point on the ground that stays in the same place in your windshield is where you are going. Everything above it you can reach. Everything below it you cannot.

That is the whole of judging a glide, it needs no numbers, and a Student can use it on the very next approach. If your explanation takes three minutes and contains a glide ratio, rewrite it.

An approach that is high can always be fixed. An approach that is low is often over.

So the whole technique is built around arriving with a surplus and spending it, and you should be teaching Students to be deliberately high early rather than precisely correct early.

1. Energy as something visible: height, speed, and where they trade.
2. The forward slip: what it does, what it does not do, and the inputs.
3. The forward slip and the sideslip, properly distinguished.
4. Slip limitations for the airplane you are flying, from its own material.
5. Recognizing a slip that has stopped working.
6. The power-off 180: the key positions, and what you can still decide at each.
7. Judging the glide without an instrument.
8. Configuration as the primary adjustment, and why flaps come out late.
9. Teaching a Student to be early rather than late.

Some airplanes limit or prohibit slips with flaps extended, and some do not. It is airplane specific and it is in that airplane's approved material.

Bring the page reference. Not the answer from memory, and not what was true of the airplane you did your commercial in. If you cannot find it, say so, because being unable to locate a limitation is the same problem as not knowing it.

1. Teach your preflight ground lesson, including the slip limitations for today's airplane.
2. Demonstrate a forward slip to a landing from the right seat, narrating.
3. Demonstrate a power-off 180 to the agreed touchdown point, narrating.
4. Talk your instructor through both, including one approach that arrives high and one that arrives low.
5. Teach the aim point technique in a form your Student can use on the next circuit.
6. Take the airplane at the threshold, out loud, three-way.
7. Critique, self-critique, then listen.

1. You deliver the preflight ground lesson on slips and the power-off 180, covering all seven items of the brief, and state the slip limitations for the airplane being flown, from that airplane's own approved material.
2. You fly a forward slip to a landing to commercial pilot tolerances from the right seat while narrating continuously, maintaining airspeed throughout and straightening before touchdown.
3. You distinguish the forward slip from the sideslip in what you teach, and name what each is for.
4. You fly a power-off 180 accuracy approach and landing to commercial pilot tolerances, touching down at or beyond the agreed point and within the tolerance the current AI.VII.O task specifies.
5. You teach the aim point technique, in a form the Simulated Student can apply on the next approach, without reference to a glide ratio figure.
6. You correct the high approach with configuration and slip in that order, and do not use full flaps as the first adjustment.
7. You recognize the stretched glide and stop it, naming it as the accident it is rather than as an error of technique.
8. You call a go-around and apply power when a power-off approach will not reach the runway, rather than salvaging it quietly.
9. 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.
10. You deliver a critique naming the error, its probable cause, and the correction for at least two of the errors flown.
11. You deliver a self-critique before hearing the instructor's.

Standard 7 is the safety-critical one. Stretching a glide is the most reliably fatal habit in light aircraft, and you will spend a career teaching against it.

Falling short does not block lesson 37. No proficiency gate. It triggers the visibility rule in policy/REMEDIATION-VISIBILITY.md.

• Slip limitations from memory or from another type.
• Forward slip and sideslip used interchangeably.
• Airspeed decaying in the slip.
• The slip held into the flare.
• Full flaps as the first fix for a high approach. It is the one adjustment you cannot take back.
• Corrections starting on short final. Every correction is easier high.
• Aiming at the numbers instead of the agreed point.
• Teaching the glide with a ratio figure nobody can use in flight.
• Stretching a low glide.
• Quietly adding power to save a power-off approach. If power goes in, it is a go-around, and you call it.
• Teaching the power-off 180 as an exam item.

Every trigger below is checkable in one second, on purpose.

• The nose is raised to stretch a glide, at any altitude.
• Airspeed reaches 1.1 Vso on final or in a slip without correction applied.
• The airplane is not on the runway centerline extended below 200 ft AGL.
• A slip is still established below 50 ft AGL.
• The airplane floats past the midpoint of the runway and no go-around has been started.
• The nose is pushed forward in the flare or in a balloon.
• Bank exceeds 30 degrees below 500 ft AGL.
• Either of us is unclear about who is flying the airplane.

The stretched glide item has no time allowance and no qualifier. Everywhere else in this program you get a second or two for the correction to appear. Not here. The airplane is already slow, already low, and already descending, and those two seconds do not exist.

Lesson 34's go-around gate still applies, with one addition: on a power-off approach, a go-around means power in and called out loud, and it is not a failure of the exercise. A salvaged approach nobody named is.

Positive exchange of controls, both directions, every time.

Three slots, all currently empty: VS-36-1 Exemplar on AI.VII.O, VS-36-2 Error on AI.VII.O, VS-36-3 Error on AI.VII.M.

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