Lesson 6

Stalls

I'd been looking forward to stalls. Flying the aircraft to the point when the wings stop producing enough lift, and effectively falls from the sky sounds like great fun, and it was. Although it was as un-spectacular as I expected it to be, too. Training aircraft (and most modern light aircraft) are designed so that the stall is pretty benign, and easy to recover from. This is obviously for safety reasons, and due to the fact that during training what you want is stability, so you dont end up whizzing around all over the place. If you're doing serious aerobatics you want less stability in the aircraft, so that you can whizz about all over the place.

After the briefing I did the preflight check and we hopped in the Skipper and filled her up at the bowser, taxied over and did the runup before departing runway 06. The weather was great again, by the way.

After the initial climb I was in charge of getting us up to 4,000 feet, which took a little while owing to the warm air, which I didn't mind as it gave me a nice long chance to practice holding the climbing settings, which I'm feeling comfortable with now. After leveling off my trusty instructor demonstrated some of the stalls we'd been talking about in the briefing. The main symptom of a stall in the Skipper is a the 'buffeting' of the tail, which I'd read up on and turned out to be the primary indicator apart from the getting below the green arc on the airspeed indicator. When it does stall, the Skipper's tail bumps around a little bit (due to the turbulent off the back of the stalled wing hitting the tail) and then the nose lowers if you let it. All you have to do is let go of the controls and the damn thing un-stalls itself! Like I said, stability.

Although it was valuable to learn about it all, the two most fun versions for me were the full-power stall, and the recovery from a power-off stall. The full-power stall taught me that you'd have to be an absolute maniac to manage a stall with the throttle up all the way - the nose attitude was so high we were almost impersonating a helicopter.

Stalling with no power is much easier, and happens at a lower angle of attack, which more usefully simulates stall conditions in a power-off glide, or even a low-power descent. With this one the recovery was the fun part. Upon feeling the tail bump around, all you have to do is move open the throttle to full, and pull back gently once the airspeed picks up. This produces a pleasing g-force sensation that makes you feel like you're going really fast, which in the Skipper is around 60-70 knots, which isn't very fast at all.

The stalls themselves were mainly a non-event, which is exactly how I've read them described in every article about some new aeroplane. As my trusty instructor pointed out, many of these training maneuvers are based on older airframe designs that could potentially get you in a little bit more trouble. Whereas most modern light aircraft (post-1970?) are well-designed enough that it's not really an issue, although obviously it pays to know and practice.

Having said that, next week's lesson is entitled 'Stalls - Advanced', so we'll see how I feel about it after that.

We also decided that I need more work on my turns, because I just cant seem to get the elevator pressure right and hold my altitude. It'll be a good idea to get that sorted before I test my skills in the circuit.