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:
“The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
—Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
“When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things ...”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)