In short: Rod Machado argues that the FAA’s energy management chapter in the Airplane Flying Handbook replaces a simple, practical rule about elevator and throttle with abstract language that primary students struggle to use. He traces the FAA’s advice from 1965 to today and makes the case that pitch and power usage is a personal technique, not a safety-critical procedure.
Video: “Fantasy Based Energy Management Flight Training” by Rod Machado, from his YouTube channel.
What you’ll learn
- The difference between a procedure and a technique, and why it matters here
- Why Rod says pitch-for-airspeed versus power-for-altitude is a matter of preference
- How FAA handbook guidance on elevator and throttle changed from 1965 to 2021
- What the FAA now means by total energy and energy distribution controllers
- Why Rod believes simple elevator and throttle language serves students better
Technique is not procedure
This longer video is aimed mainly at flight instructors. Rod begins by separating two ideas. A procedure is a fixed sequence of steps, such as a pre-landing checklist. A technique is a personal way of doing something well, such as how you trim or how smoothly you work the elevator and throttle. Two pilots can follow the same procedure using very different techniques.
In Rod’s view, whether you control airspeed with pitch and glide path with power, or the reverse, is a technique. He says he knows of no NTSB report blaming a general aviation crash on the pitch-power technique itself; accidents come from failing to apply a technique properly. He recalls being told that the C-17 training program used one convention for the Navy and the opposite for the Air Force, and both worked.
From seven words to thousands
Rod walks through the history. The 1965 Flight Training Handbook told pilots to control the glide path with throttle and airspeed with pitch. The 1980 edition reversed that, which Rod considers a sound recommendation even if it differs from his own preference, and its preface favored a single uniform method for simplicity. By 2004, the Airplane Flying Handbook said to adjust power and pitch together. The 2021 edition added an energy management chapter describing the throttle as the total energy controller and the elevator as the energy distribution controller.
Rod’s complaint is that the new rules still have to be translated back into elevator and throttle movements before a student can act on them. He notes that angle of attack appears only once in the chapter, and argues that the old simple rule quietly taught two vital lessons: the elevator governs how close you are to a stall, and without power you cannot stretch a glide.
What Rod wants instructors to keep
Rod attributes the shift partly to a university paper that, in his opinion, offered no proof for its claims, and he worries that young instructors will tell a student to change their energy state instead of simply saying lower the nose. He does not doubt the good intentions behind the change, but he believes energy management can be explained in a few hundred words and a simple bicycle-on-a-hill picture. His recommendation to instructors is to keep control instructions concrete.
Go deeper with Rod Machado
Rod teaches airplane control in plain, practical terms that student pilots can act on in the How to Fly an Airplane eCourse. Learn more in How to Fly an Airplane eCourse.
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