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Old 12th May 2015, 16:32
  #11 (permalink)  
AerocatS2A
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Here and there
Posts: 3,101
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Vilters, it is not as simple as that. If you find you have got low on the approach you will need to add power, and the thrust/drag couple means that changing thrust will change the trim requirement. Adding a handful of power and thinking you don't need to touch the trim can lead you into all sorts of trouble.

I hope you are not really suggesting to use only rudder to enter and exit the turns in the circuit? That is a sure fire way of turning a stall into a spin, particularly if the pilot following your advice might not have a lot of finesse or feel for the aircraft.

The problem with accidents caused by gross handling errors such as stall/spin is that those who find themselves in those situations probably don't have a huge amount of finesse to begin with.

To the op I would say do lots of aeros. If you get nothing else out of it you will get a true appreciation of the fact that you can stall at ANY speed, angle of attack is king, control your AoA and and you control your margin over the stall. Do a loop and you will see that over the top your air speed can be well below the "stall speed" but by controlling the AoA you can prevent a stall. Pulling out of the bottom you will be much faster than your "stall speed" but pull too hard on the yoke and you will feel the wings let go of the air, ease up on the back pressure and you will feel the wings work again.

You don't have an AoA gauge in your aeroplane but you can feel g forces through your body. The more g you feel, the faster your stalling speed will be and vice versa. You can't learn this stuff from a message board though, you need to get out there and experience it.

The problem with a lot of stall training is that it is not done in a way that simulates the scenario when you are most likely to encounter it. You are low on profile, have left the turn to final a bit late, and are looking out at the runway which is in a slightly unfamiliar position in the windscreen, maybe you have to look around the pillar a bit. You are flying through the centerline and you instinctively bank more to correct this. You pull back on the yoke as well because the more you bank, the more lift you are losing. You are focussed on the runway to the point that you get tunnel vision and you lose awareness of the energy state of your aircraft. The next thing you know there is a beep, and one of the wings lets go. Briefly startled, and very conscious that you are quite low you find some kind of basic instincts over-ride the brief stall training you had and you add power and pull back on the yoke. The pitch up moment from the power increase compounds the pro-stall pull on the yoke and you find yourself fully stalled and starting to spin.

You ask yourself "how the hell did I end up here?"

I would say the answer is not that you cocked up the stall recovery but that you allowed yourself to get into the situation in the first place. Take yourself back to when you recognized that you were low and wouldn't be able to roll out on centerline using normal bank angles. That was the time to do get yourself out of the situation. Give yourself hard limits, 30° bank, 1000 fpm rate of descent (just examples). If you can't achieve your nominated aim point without exceeding those then go-around. Finally, practice your go-arounds. From my experience the missed approach is the most commonly ballsed up manouvre, simply because people tend not to practice it, and they happen at unexpected times.

To summarize: learn to recognize the types of situation that can lead to a stall and don't allow those situations to ever develop.
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