Yeah, pattern flying is fun, and exhausting.

The concentration required to fly precise maneuvers really wears you down mentally. Ive never flown in competition, but I have been instructed in pattern flight. If you get a pattern flyer to help teach you, you will see things in your flying you never noticed before. I have to say it was a huge learning experience. It requires extreme patience, attentiveness, and a real finesse that most fliers just dont have. When you see a pattern flier fly, you can tell he's a pattern flyer.

As if flying the maneuvers wasnt hard enough, doing it so that they are shaped perfectly, altitude stays constant, you come out of a maneuver EXACTLY where you entered it, and nothing is half @**ed. In pattern flying, it either is or it isnt. If you botch one thing in a pattern flight...everyone is going to notice it.

Surprisingly the hardest maneuver for me to learn was how to get a stall turn to look exactly right. Bear in mind that in pattern flight, what you see is not always what really happened. For instance in a stall turn, as the plane rotates on yaw axis during the stall, as it comes back down, in a real stall the tail will wiggle slightly from side to side. Well the problem with actually doing a REAL stall turn, is that it of course makes the plane unstable. So alot of pattern fliers, will "cheat" the stall. That is they will get it REAL close, but not quite stall it. Problem with this is that the backside wont have that charactoristic tail wiggle. Well most pattern fliers have figured out how to cheat this too. They know just the right amount of back and forth rudder inputs to get that tail to appear to be correct. The judges used to look for that tail wiggle as a sign that it actually did stall, although now I dont think they look for that anymore, if Im not mistaken now they dont want to see the tail move.

Loops are supposed to be PERFECTLY round. A pattern flier knows that at the top, you may actually have to hold DOWN elevator to keep the top round.

During slow rolls, most pattern fliers will start feeding in the rudder, as the wing starts rolling. It looks much smoother than if you start rolling the plane, and wait until the wing is vertical before putting in rudder.

There is another little trick. Occasionally you will come out of a maneuver and the wings wont quite be level. Well the judges are looking real close, so if you give aileron to correct and they see it....bang deduction. So alot of guys will roll it back upright with rudder. If done right, you cant even tell they made a correction.

Its little things like this that you cant really see, but these are the things that make a pattern flight look so smooth and refined. Some of these guys are really slick.