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Old 1st October 2002 | 19:35
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merchants
 
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 8
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From: uk
Question Superstall recovery

I’ve been reading a book on the old HS Trident, and it says that a prototype was lost during testing due to a ‘superstall’, which the aircraft entered inadvertently. Sadly, all on board were killed.

I understand that such a stall is unrecoverable because the disturbed airflow from the stalled wings flows over the elevator in a T-Tail aircraft. The Elevators thus cannot be used to recover the aircraft.

But would it be possible to use the ailerons to recover? I read somewhere else that the secondary effect of ‘roll’ is ‘yaw’. So if you rolled a ‘superstalled’ Trident, would the nose drop due to yaw, as the aircraft rolled, thus enabling recovery?

Or would the disturbed airflow over the wings prevent such a manoeuvre?

As a layman, I’m interested in this. After all, the worst aircrash on UK soil was a ‘superstalled’ Trident that crashed at Staines in 1972, killing all 112 on board. There are still T-Tail designs flying (e.g. Gulfstream, Boeing 717), and I wondered if this had ever been considered?
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