PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Picking up a stalled wing with full rudder no aileron.
Old 25th May 2016, 07:54
  #20 (permalink)  
Centaurus
 
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Australia
Posts: 4,188
Likes: 0
Received 14 Likes on 5 Posts
Very well explained Ghengis. That should be framed and displayed in every flying school briefing room.
I first met up with wing drops at the stall when learning to fly the RAAF Wirraway trainer. A whole bunch of trainee pilots straight from Tiger Moths were bussed in to Uranquinty NSW to commence basic flying training. As the base had just been re-opened after the war, aircraft and instructors were still arriving and setting up. Our bus stopped at the aerodrome perimeter to allow us trainees to watch our future steeds arriving en masse.

One Wirraway passed directly over the top of us and lo and behold the pilot (who was a Warrant Officer instructor) held off too high and floated over the grass field. It looked like a beaut three-pointer was about to be made when one wing dropped sharply and the wing tip bashed the ground.

We had seen our first dreaded wing drop of a Wirraway which was notorious for such a thing. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words. Apart from the universal exclamation of '****" from we 30 trainees in the bus, there was a moments silence and we could see all the rumours of Wirraway wing drop tendency was true.

Yet the stall recovery technique as explained by Ghengis in his post was taught to us then and remains true to this day. Never did we hear the term "pick up the dropped wing with rudder." However our instructors did demonstrate that instinctive application of instant aileron to pick up a dropped wing at the point of stall, usually resulted in that wing dropping more sharply and into an incipient spin in the Wirraway.

A generalisation I know, but it was said by our instructors in those days that if you could fly a Wirraway safely you could fly anything.
There was a grain of truth in that claim since many of us went directly to Mustangs and even huge Lincoln bombers straight from Wirraways without bending anything. It was considered no big deal at the time.
Centaurus is offline