Visual flight or "Visual Attitude Flying" is a method of controlling an aircraft where the aircraft attitude is determined by observing outside visual references.
The remainder of this article is applicable to fixed-wing aircraft; much of it is also relevant to gliders and hang gliders, with the obvious exceptions of any references to engines and power.
For aircraft the primary visual reference used is usually the relationship between the aircraft's "nose" or cowling against the natural horizon.
The pilot can maintain or change the airspeed, altitude, and direction of flight (heading) as well as the rate of climb or rate of descent and rate of turn (bank angle) through the use of the aircraft flight controls and aircraft engine controls to adjust the "sight picture". Some reference to flight instruments is usually necessary to determine exact airspeed, altitude, heading, bank angle and rate of climb/descent.
There are 3 components to the aircraft's attitude. They are pitch, roll and yaw.
Famous quotes containing the words visual and/or flight:
“Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.”
—Robert Doisneau (b. 1912)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)