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Chandelles

A chandelle is the most altitude your airplane can buy with 180 degrees of turn. You fly it to prove you can hold the airplane coordinated at high pitch and low airspeed, spending every knot you have on climbing and turning at once.

Performance Maneuvers — FI.IX.C

Why the maneuver exists

You can already do a maximum-performance climb, and you can already reverse course. Combining the two into one smooth, coordinated maneuver — trading every knot you have for altitude and heading at the same time — is what takes real airmanship. That is the whole point of the exercise: energy management, coordination, and airplane control at high pitch and low airspeed, where the margins are thin and everything you do with your feet shows.

The name is French. Monter en chandelle means roughly to climb steeply, or to zoom, and it has outlasted whatever flying first earned it.

There is a practical edge to it, though a narrow one. Knowing how much altitude your airplane will actually give you for 180 degrees of turn, and how slowly it can be flown while giving it, is worth finding out at altitude on a quiet afternoon rather than guessing at it later. The answer also moves with density altitude, and can be far worse than the number you remember from a cool morning at sea level. Treat that as knowledge about your airplane, not as a technique to reach for: the chandelle is not a terrain escape. Escaping rising terrain is a level, maximum-rate turn at maneuvering speed, started early, not a climbing turn flown to the edge of a stall.

What a chandelle is

A chandelle is a maximum-performance climbing turn through 180 degrees, entered from straight-and-level flight and finished wings level in a nose-high attitude just above stall speed. The goal is the most altitude gain the airplane can produce for the bank and power you are using — not the steepest turn, and not the fastest one.

It is best understood as two halves that are flown differently:

• First 90 degrees — constant bank, changing pitch. You hold the entry bank, approximately 30 degrees, and raise the nose steadily.
• Second 90 degrees — constant pitch, changing bank. The pitch attitude you reached at the 90-degree point is now frozen, and you roll out gradually so the wings come level exactly as the nose passes the 180-degree point.

Getting those two halves straight in your head before you get in the airplane is most of the battle. Almost every common error is a pilot doing the first half's job during the second half, or the other way around.

Flying it

Clear the area with clearing turns, and pick a prominent visual reference off the wing so you can judge the 90 and 180-degree points by looking outside. This is a visual maneuver. Set up high enough that you finish no lower than 1,500 feet AGL, and enter in the configuration your POH calls for — the ACS asks only for the appropriate entry configuration, and which configuration that is belongs to the manufacturer, not to a rule of thumb.

1. Establish level flight at or below maneuvering speed. Check your POH for the entry speed and power setting your airplane wants — and remember that maneuvering speed is lower at lower weights.
2. Roll smoothly into approximately 30 degrees of bank and hold it there.
3. Begin a steady increase in pitch, and add power as your POH specifies. The pitch change is gradual and continuous, not a pull.
4. At the 90-degree point, stop raising the nose. This is the highest pitch attitude of the maneuver, and it stays there.
5. Through the second 90 degrees, roll out slowly and continuously while the airspeed bleeds off. Hold the pitch attitude with increasing back pressure as the airplane slows.
6. At the 180-degree point, the wings are level and the airspeed is just above stall. Hold it there momentarily without stalling, then make a gradual return to cruise — lower the nose, let the airplane accelerate, and resume straight-and-level flight. Some altitude loss during that recovery is normal and expected; holding the nose high to protect every foot you gained is how a completed maneuver turns into a stall.

Rolled out on heading within 10 degrees, just above stall, wings level, nose high, no stall and no loss of coordination — that is a chandelle.

What the airplane does to you

Three things are working against you the whole way round.

Overbanking tendency. In a turn the outside wing travels farther and faster than the inside wing and produces more lift, so the bank can want to steepen on its own. The effect grows as the turn radius shrinks, which is why it is discussed mostly in the context of steep turns; at somewhere near 30 degrees a typical trainer sits close to neutral, and some airplanes will want to roll wings-level instead. Which way yours goes, and how much, is something you find out by flying it. Either way, the bank is a number you hold with aileron pressure as required — watch it and correct it, rather than setting it once and trusting it to stay.

Left-turning tendencies. Power is going up while airspeed is coming down, which is exactly the combination that demands the most right rudder. A chandelle to the left and a chandelle to the right do not feel the same, and the rudder pressure keeps changing all the way through. Coordination is judged continuously, not at the end.

Accelerated stalls. Loaded and slow is the setup for a stall well above the number in the book. Say the rest of it plainly: an accelerated stall at high pitch and low airspeed with the ball out of center is a stall-spin departure. One wing stalls first, drops, and the airplane rolls and yaws toward it before you have decided anything. That is what the 1,500-foot floor is for — room to recognize it and recover. Deliberate spin entries and recoveries are not part of this maneuver and are not something to explore on your own; they are demonstrated by an instructor, in an airplane approved for them. Your protection here is that every control input is smooth and gradual. A sharp pull at the top, or a bank allowed to steepen while you are already near the edge, is what turns a chandelle into a departure.

What goes wrong

Bank is the first thing to get wrong. Too shallow and the airplane runs out of airspeed before it runs out of turn, so you arrive at 180 degrees having already stalled or nearly so. Too steep and you never get the performance — you have flown a climbing steep turn instead of a chandelle. The standard is approximately 30 degrees, and the word approximately is doing real work: a few degrees either side is normal and is not the error. Fifteen degrees, or forty-five, is.

Timing goes wrong just as often. If you keep raising the nose past the 90-degree point, or start the rollout late, you finish either stalled or still banked. If you level the wings early, you arrive at 180 degrees with airspeed to spare and nothing to show for the maneuver.

Then there are the two that have nothing to do with stick and rudder: staring at the airspeed indicator instead of flying the attitude outside, and forgetting to keep scanning for traffic while you are nose-high and slow with the cowling blocking half the windshield.

Where you meet it next

The chandelle is a Commercial Pilot ACS performance maneuver, and a flight instructor applicant will teach it as well as fly it. Its nearest neighbor is the lazy eight, and the useful thing about the pair is the contrast rather than the resemblance. A chandelle holds something still in each half — bank through the first 90 degrees, pitch through the second. A lazy eight never lets either one settle. Fly them back to back and each one teaches you what the other is not.

The rest of it you have already met. Steep turns are where you learned what bank does to stall speed, and the accelerated stall is what waits at the far end of that back pressure. The slow-flight and power-on stall work you did as a private pilot is what makes the top of a chandelle feel survivable rather than alarming. Those lessons sit alongside this one in Learn.