How to Fly a Plane at Slow Speed

Part of the Video Series How to Fly an Airplane

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Learn how to fly an airplane at the lowest possible speed in this free how to fly video.

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Video Transcript

How to Fly a Plane at Slow Speed
Hi, I'm Dave Pressy with St. Charles Flying Service on behalf of Expert Village. This is slow flying. And we're going to simulate flying the airplane at it's slowest speed that it can go before it will stop flying. Then we're going to bring in what's called minimum controllable airspeed. First, what we're going to do, is we're going to bring on our carb heat, because we're going to reduce our engine speed. Then we're going to reduce the power about 1500rpm, while simultaneously increasing the back pressure, bringing the nose up, to maintain our altitude. We'll add ten degrees of flaps, and all our flaps, and we're going to increase the power again to maintain our altitude. So we've slowed the forward speed down, but we've maintained our altitude, so if you look out the side, you can see that our angle of attack is a lot higher. The wing is pointed up farther in relation to the horizon. Because we have a lot of engine power, we have a lot of right rudder to compensate for that. If you notice, if we don't use right rudder the plane will turn to the left. It has a tendency because of the spinning propeller to turn to the left, so we need to add right rudder pressure to compensate for that turning tendency.

About the Expert

Expert: Dave Pressy has been a flight instructor in the St. Louis Area for over four years, and a pilot for more than seven years. He has accumulated nearly 1200 hours of flight time. Read More