Hmm...
I don't propose to read stuff written in such a violently unreadable style as that rant a few posts ago, sorry. That would be like trying to have a chat with the guy out in the street with a sign reading "The End is Nigh!" When I see something written in that style (?) I think, "Here we have someone with SERIOUS ISSUES THAT DEMAND OUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION," way too serious for me to deal with.
70% of statistics are made up off the top of one's head, just like the 70% of "airline pilots" who are going to give an almighty heave back on the controls when the speed is sinking, the shaker is going and now the pusher is, uh, pushing! Where do you find so many guys so tired of life that they try to end it all with a self-provoked deep stall that flies in the face of everything we are taught to do? The only one I ever heard of is the unfortunate Captain Renslow there. Even the NTSB guy on the report panel couldn't explain what he did.
This is like I drop something in your lap, you clap your legs together, assuming you are a male. It is a well-learned response, almost a reflex action. Well, same with the cues for a stall, you relax the back pressure and add power and that is just for starters. Remember what we have to learn before we go solo? Slow flight, stalls and stall recovery and most students get that within the first few hours of primary training; if they cannot get that right that pretty much ends "learning to fly" in fact!
Ever heard of Henri Mignon and his "flying flea"? He decided normal aircraft were just too darn complicated so he started leaving stuff out until he got what he liked. No stick shaker or pusher for that boy either! He was French, of course...
The rest of us have had to learn to cope with normal slow flight, pre-stall and stalls, eh, Matey? If you seriously think that 70% of all Airline Transport Pilot Licence holders are going to sit there unaware of the airspeed dropping and the shaker rattling the bejusus out of the yoke so that the pusher firing comes as a total shock to them... You are having us on there, right?
I just happen to have a copy of Captain Davies' book right here, the one where he writes that "the stick pusher must always prevent the natural stall being reached in service." (P.132) You know, that reads an awful lot like a stall protection device (what it is) and not a stall notification device (what the shaker is). That must be why you get the shaker pre-stall and the pusher to prevent the stall itself, I guess. The pusher had to be invented to prevent an unrecoverable deep stall, a most unwelcome phenomenon that came to light in some of the early t-tail jets, when the tail was blanked at high AoA so that there was no nose-down pitch authority available to the pilot for stall recovery. Some guys ended up doing a very convincing imitation of a toolbox with the lid open, crashing in a near-vertical descent in what Davies called a "super-stall," what we now call a deep stall.
If you really, really must stall any old airplane fitted with a stick pusher, well, some you can get away with that, others you will DIE! I wouldn't put that little aeronautical insight out there without pointing this fact out to the unwary, if I were you. Think of spins, which you can do in Cessna 150, no sweat. Don't try one in your Metroliner, but you probably know that already. Like a deep stall in some jets, you can get into one no problem; it is the recovery that generally is going to be im-bleedin'-possible.
Last edited by chuks; 9th Feb 2010 at 17:12.