Flight Kneeboard

Learn › Maneuvers › Lazy Eights

Lazy Eights

The lazy eight has no steady state anywhere in it. Pitch, bank, airspeed and control pressure change continuously from roll-in to roll-out — which is exactly what it is there to teach you.

Performance Maneuvers — FI.IX.D

Why the maneuver exists

Every other maneuver in the syllabus gives you something to hold. A steep turn settles at one bank angle and stays there until the rollout. Slow flight parks the airplane at one airspeed and asks you to keep it. Even the stalls, which change attitude all the way to the break, change it in one direction only. The lazy eight hands you nothing to hold on to. Load factor, control pressure and the airplane's whole energy state are different at every second of it, and there is no moment in the maneuver where you could trim it off and take stock.

That is the entire point of it. Your airplane does not answer the controls the same way 30 knots above the stall as it does 10 knots above it, and it does not want the same rudder in a climbing turn that it wants in a descending one. A lazy eight walks you slowly through that whole range, twice, in both directions, and never lets you settle. What you are building is feel — smoothness, timing, and a sense of where the airplane's energy is going — along with the orientation and division of attention to hold a visual reference, monitor the panel and keep looking for traffic while all of it is moving.

The shape

Two 180-degree turns in opposite directions. In each one the nose rises, the airspeed bleeds off, the nose arcs over the top and comes back down, so that the airplane's nose traces a slow figure eight against the horizon. That is where the name comes from, and it is also the standard you are flying to: the controls should look lazy. Nothing is abrupt, nothing is snapped into place, and every change is led into rather than commanded.

Before you roll in, pick your references. Note the entry heading, then choose landmarks on the horizon at the 45, 90 and 135-degree positions. Each one marks something different: the 45 is where the pitch attitude is highest, the 90 is where the bank is steepest, the airspeed lowest and the airplane highest, and the 135 is where the nose is furthest down. Those three points, and the 180 where you roll out, are the landmarks of the whole maneuver, and if you have not chosen them before you start you will end up chasing the airplane instead of flying it.

Set it up first — CHAPS

Run the same check before every maneuver, so that nothing about the setup is left to memory in the moment.

Flying it

Enter in level flight at the entry speed the manufacturer recommends for the maneuver. Most POHs do not publish one, because lazy eights are rarely a book maneuver, and where there is no recommended figure the guidance is to enter at or below maneuvering speed. That limit is structural rather than aerodynamic: below maneuvering speed the wing stalls before the airframe can be loaded past its limit load factor, so the stall arrives first and protects the airplane. Above it, an abrupt or full control deflection can overstress the airframe before the wing ever gives up. Enter fast and every correction you make in the pull-up is being made in the part of the envelope where the airplane no longer protects itself.

From there the maneuver has four positions, and everything between them is a smooth transition rather than a step.

  1. 45-degree point. Maximum pitch-up attitude, with the bank still shallow — roughly 15 degrees. Pitch has been increasing steadily since entry and the bank has been coming in slowly underneath it.
  2. 90-degree point. Maximum bank, approximately 30 degrees, and the lowest airspeed of the maneuver. The pitch attitude is passing back down through level and the airplane is at its highest altitude. Pitch is now decreasing while bank is still increasing, which is the part that feels wrong the first few times.
  3. 135-degree point. Maximum pitch-down attitude, bank back to about 15 degrees and still rolling out. Airspeed is building again.
  4. 180-degree point. Wings level, back at the entry altitude, entry airspeed and the reciprocal of the entry heading — and immediately rolling into the other direction without a pause.

Rudder is the part nobody warns you about. The climbing turn and the descending turn do not need the same feet: as the airspeed falls the controls go soft and the airplane needs more rudder to stay coordinated, and as it builds back up on the descending half it needs less. The ball, or the seat of your pants, has to be part of the scan the whole way round. Do not use rudder to speed the turn up when you are behind. That is a skid, and a skidding turn with the nose high and the airspeed low is how a cross-controlled stall begins: the inside wing stalls first, the airplane rolls into the turn, and a spin entry follows. That sequence is flown deliberately, at altitude, in the cross-controlled stall demonstration your instructor performs for you, and in the spin training a flight instructor applicant receives. It has no business appearing in a lazy eight.

What goes wrong

The most common failure is simply not letting the airspeed decay enough by the 90-degree point. If the nose never really comes up, the eight flattens out into two ordinary shallow turns, and the maneuver stops teaching anything. The opposite error is climbing so steeply that you arrive at the 90-degree point far too slow, with the bank still coming in and no elevator authority left to finish it.

Beyond that, most of the trouble is timing rather than technique. Pitch and bank rates that do not match mean you reach maximum bank before maximum pitch, or the other way round, and the second half cannot be flown symmetrically to fix it. Abrupt inputs give the whole thing a mechanical feel. And letting the turn run past 180 degrees, or arriving there off altitude or off airspeed, is what usually gets it repeated.

Where you meet it next

Lazy eights are a Performance Maneuvers task in both the Commercial Pilot ACS and the Flight Instructor ACS, so on the CFI track you will teach this one as well as fly it. Either way you are judged at the 180-degree points: altitude within 100 feet of the entry altitude, airspeed within 10 knots of the entry airspeed, heading within 10 degrees of the reciprocal of the entry heading, approximately 30 degrees of bank at the steepest point, and coordinated flight throughout. Check the current ACS for the certificate you are flying for before the ride.

The closest relative is the chandelle, the other performance maneuver that asks you to keep pitch and bank moving and never lets both settle at once, and the feel the two of them build shows up well beyond the practice area — the same slow, led-into pressure changes that make a good soft-field takeoff and a stable approach in gusty air. The rudder lesson, that a slow airplane with a high nose in a turn needs your feet more than your hands, is the one that matters on base to final, where there is no altitude to spare; the cross-controlled stall and spin awareness lessons are where that same sequence gets shown to you on purpose. The rest of the ground school lessons keep coming back to it.

Advertisement