Originally Posted by
JammedStab
As I go through the Airbus Upset Recovery Training they mention about how we used to try to maintain altitude in a stall recovery in the sim until the obvious became obvious and it was not longer trained that way.
But one does have to ask, how did it become that way in the first place. Was there a desire by the Powers That Be to not have an ATC violation or was it assumed that a stall could only ever happen close to the ground.
Was this something that came from the manufacturers or the regulators?
Perhaps it is all lost in the sands of time but it would be interesting to know how it was done back in the '60's or earlier.
Anyone?
I think it was due to the wording of the Practical Test Standards in use at the time, which mandated a stall recovery with minimum loss of height. If you lost more than 100ft(?) during the recovery, you failed the test. The only way to achieve that was to add loads of power and only lower the nose a tiny amount.
This requirement was fed back into the type-rating training courses and this eventually became the ‘standard method’ of teaching stall recovery. It was certainly the way I was taught to recover in the 737 and 747. I thought it was wrong at the time (unless at very low altitude) but discussing it with the examiner did not prove worthwhile.
I was pleased when both Boeing and Airbus revised their techniques following the Colgan, Air France and Turkish crashes. I was taught the ‘stick forward first’ method on the A320 and 787.