Originally Posted by
megan
Allied issue is that very few people these days are given spin training
And there is the currency / recetn splin recovery experience as well.
Some flight schools in my neighbourhood had a bad experience with instructors who taught their students "too much" about incipient spins outside of the PPL syllabus, as it created a failse impression in the low-hour PPLs that they can master stalls and spins and subsequently became lenient / complacent on stall avoidance, resulting in at least 2 deadly accidents in past 8 years. I am also partially guilty in practicing a stall and incipient spin recovery without instructor once (with HASEL checks of course, and after a recent practice with an instructor on board, but still a bit dumb thing to do)..
Another problem is the startle / surprise effect, which is a huge factor, totally underestimated. During practice, we go into the stall with knowing it will happen, knowing that aileron movements should be reduced, and incipient spin occurs when we want it, into the direcion we want it, with the rudder. Not a single real-life stall occurs this way! I had the sobering experience of a departure stall during my commercial training and there you can go below Vs (steep climb is less than 1 G load), but the full engine power and decaying speed yaws the aircraft more than in the wings level power-off approach stall. So the first time, I couldn't really predict the moment, when the aircraft would stall and I accidentally corrected a little harmless wing drop with tiny little aileron correction, and as the wing started to drop even more, it took me another looong second to realize that we are entering a spin unexpectedly, earrlier than what I thought originally. I can tell it's a totally different ballgame, when the stall comes unexpected.
So I can only agree with the AvWeb video: the only thing that matters to avoid fatal stalls is avoiding high banks and speed control among huge distractions Nothing else matters at cricuit height and this is confirmed by the KHOU case, where the flaps were retracted at a progressively lower and lower airspeeds (way below the normal operating procedures). If this accident also showed low speed on the downwind already, which is rather bad omen for the upcoming downwind-to-base and base-to-final turns....