Learning to Fly- The Instruments Inside

When learning to fly, there are several basic on board instruments you eventually need to learn how to use. One of these instruments keeps track of the artificial horizon. The artificial horizon shows how your plane is positioned in relationship to the horizon. For example, if the nose of your plane is pointed up, the instrument will show a visual representation of your plane above a line which represents the horizon. If your plane is pointed down, below the horizon, the visual representation of the plane will be below the line representing the horizon.

If you’re wondering why the position of your plane relative to the horizon is important, it is because when flying, unless you want to descend or climb, the plane should be aligned with the horizon. If you plane is pointed below the horizon, it will pick up speed and can accelerate more than you want. If your plane is pointed too high up relative to the horizon, what can happen is your plane will stall. A stall condition is something you want to avoid. A stall condition is a condition where the flow of the air across the wings of the plane is not an even flow. A bad stall and cause a plane to begin to lose altitude at a rapid rate and can cause you to lose control of the plane.

Another useful instrument or aspect of the instruments on a small plane is called a stall warning indicator. What happens with the indicator is that when the plane is in a stall condition, a noise will sound alerting you of the stall so that you can correct the condition. The easiest way to recover from a stall is to point the plane down so that the air current will flow more evenly across the wings of the plane.

Another type of instrument that is needed on a plane for navigational purposes is called the ADF. The term “ADF” refers to the term Automatic Direction Finder. What an automatic direction finder does is allow you to tune in on a radio station and get that station’s geographic coordinates. Once you have the coordinates, you can fly towards that signal in a straight line. If you stray to the left or right of that line the ADF will indicate that to you so you can get back on course. There are more sophisticated instruments than the ADF but it is a useful tool- particularly when you are flying in more rural areas where there are not as many tools that can be used to navigate your plane.

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