Chandelle

The chandelle asks a pilot to trade airspeed for altitude and heading change in one continuous, coordinated movement, and to arrive at a precise end state with almost no energy left in reserve. FAA-S-ACS-7 sets it out in two halves. From entry, the applicant establishes roughly 30 degrees of bank and applies power and pitch together to produce a smooth climbing turn to the 90-degree point, holding that bank while the airspeed decays continuously. From the 90-degree point to the 180-degree point the bank is rolled out at a constant rate while power and pitch attitude are held constant, so the airplane keeps climbing while slowing. The rollout must be complete at the 180-degree point within plus or minus 10 degrees, at an airspeed just above a stall, and that airspeed has to be held momentarily without actually stalling before straight-and-level flight is resumed with minimum loss of altitude.

What makes it demanding is that the two halves are governed by different disciplines. The first half is a bank-holding problem with a moving airspeed target; the second is a pitch-and-rate problem where the bank is going away and the margin above the stall is shrinking at the same time. The ACS also requires the maneuver to be planned so it is completed no lower than 1,500 feet AGL, and lists overbanking tendency, maneuvering speed including the effect of weight changes, and accelerated stalls among the aerodynamics the applicant must understand.

For a flight school, the chandelle is one of the clearest markers of the step from private to commercial standard. A private pilot flies a turn to a heading; a commercial applicant flies a turn to a heading while managing a continuously changing energy state and arriving at a defined airspeed. Because the tolerance that gets graded is a heading at a single instant, instructors tend to find that students fail it on planning rather than on stick-and-rudder skill: an entry airspeed or power setting that was slightly wrong makes the correct rollout impossible however well the second half is flown.

The maneuver is also a scheduling consideration. It needs usable altitude beneath it, a practice area, and enough sortie length that a student can repeat it several times in a lesson, so schools running a busy circuit pattern often have to protect commercial airwork slots deliberately.

Aviatize lets a school define the chandelle as its own syllabus objective inside the commercial course, so each attempt is graded and recorded against the ACS tolerance rather than noted in free text. Because the training record is longitudinal, a chief instructor can see whether a student's rollout accuracy is improving across lessons or whether the same planning error keeps recurring, and the pre-checkride review can be evidenced rather than recalled.