Visualizing Commercial ManEUvers in CloudAhoy

Recently, I started focusing once again on commercial maneuvers. I had started working on these (chandelles, eights on pylons, lazy eights, etc) several months ago before changing my focus to instrument training. One very useful postflight tool I've been using is CloudAhoy. It's helpful for visualizing and analyzing many aspects of the flight. After almost every flight, I look at the CloudAhoy data to see how well I did at flying a stabilized approach to landing on my desired glide path and airspeeds. But as you can see from the photo on the right, it's also helpful for seeing how well I did on maneuvers—in this case, eights on pylons.

As you can see from the images on the right, I made some significant improvement from the first set to the second and third sets. Of course, I knew this while flying, but it's good to get the visual feedback as a confirmation. CloudAhoy also gives me graphs of airspeed and altitude, but maybe I'll cover that in another blog post!

​If you're doing training, whether it's primary or advanced, I'd recommend taking advantage of tools like CloudAhoy to help you learn from each of your flights.

Second and third sets of eights on pylons

My first attempt at eights on pylons