Hi i could use some help with paths. i’m trying to get a plane to fly on a path/curve. so i modeled the curve how i wanted the plane to fly and parented the plane to it. It works fine, the only problem is that it moves way too fast. i want it to slowly glide, then dive, glide a little more, etc. but it just whooshes through the whole thing in about 100 frames. I saw a setting in the edit or object panels that the tooltip text said something to the effect of ‘amount of frames the animation will span’ and it was set to 100. but nothing changed when i raised it to 250? 
So if anyone knows what the deal is with this i would appreciate it! Thanks.
That is because you added a “path” more than like rather than a curve initialy. What’s the difference? When you create a path, it creates a speed IPO that is 100 frames long to “auto-animate” the child for you.
You have two options, delete the path and create a curve, then animate the object down the curve again using your prefered animation length. Or open up an IPO window and select “Path” by default is says “Object”. Once you have selected the Path dropdown in the IPO window, you will see a speed curve going from 0-100. Simply extend it beyond 100 or as you see fit.
Thanks! Thats exactly what i meant!
Speed and Time are the easily-overlooked IPOs in Blender. There are plenty of good articles out there (here and elsewhere) which cover this topic very thoroughly, and these are well-worth careful consideration.