Simulator training...
Stall recovery training in the simulator isn't done to a full-breaking stall usually, is it?
From what I remember about the Dornier 328 (the only large airplane I have had simulator training on) the simulator training has you responding to the stick-shaker to initiate recovery. That would be the PF calling "Stall!", going to TOGA power and then making an appropriate stall recovery, when the call would be "Stall recovery complete."
It is pretty much a non-event, giving that if you do it right you never enter the full-stall regime. (In fact, I don't think the sim is required to model that with 100% fidelity. Low-speed handling in the 328 sim was pretty woolly, much sloppier than the real aircraft.)
A properly-flown stall recovery should see you losing very little if any altitude. Even at altitude there's no real question of "pushing" the nose down "to break the stall." You are responding to the stick-shaker, which is a stall warning occurring before the stall itself so that there is no stall to break. Really, you are just getting away from a pre-stall condition. For a straight-ahead power-off stall this means just going to idle, raising the nose enought to get a 1 knot/second speed decay and waiting for the shaker. Putting the nose on the horizon with TOGA power usually sees a smooth acceleration out of the pre-stall regime with little or no descent.
If you get the pusher then that means you have already had the shaker. The shaker, though, is your first cue to start the stall recovery. That is what it is there for.
If you overpower the pusher then, yes, the aircraft will enter the full-stall regime. For one thing, you have to be able to overpower the pusher as a safety measure in case you get a false pusher actuation, as sometimes happens. You would not want an aircraft that could put itself into an unrecoverable dive just after takeoff or on short final, for instance. But if you choose to overpower that nose-down pusher input when it really is just doing its job, keeping the aircraft from becoming fully-stalled, well...
I think we try to stay away from speaking of "pushing" or "pulling" when we are speaking of how we fly. We want our aircraft to achieve a certain attitude so that we focus on the desired attitude. For instance you should not tell a primary student to "Push the wheel forward to break the stall." Instead you might say, "Put the aircraft in (such-and-such an attitude)." Telling some muscle-man to "Push!" can see your heads hitting the headliner in a Cessna 150!
Here we are getting a description of what happened, a 25-pound pull, but that is not how we should speak of it when flying. I just need to know where I want the airplane relative to the horizon.
Last edited by chuks; 26th Mar 2009 at 16:53.