teaching stalls
 

can anyone advise or enlighten me as to the best technique when teaching students to recover from incipient stalls?
ie. stall warner sounds, then....

lower nose until stall warner stops while at same time applying full power to recover to climb (Vx)

what about stalls in turn, what does anyone teach for entry and recovery.. procedure etc..

cheers..

All very generic, and will need to be modified for your particular type. Also, specifically relating to clean power-off stalls - will need to be modified for anything else.

First of all, teach the entry to the stall: HASELL checks, followed by idle power, using elevators to keep height, and possibly trimming until speed decays past Vy.

Once the student reaches this point, take control. Demonstrate the symptoms of the approaching stall - nose high, controls sloppy, slow airspeed, and, if you hold it a little longer, stall warner and light buffer. Demonstrate that, if you lower the nose just a tiny bit, all of these symptoms go away. Raise the nose again, and the symptoms return. Repeat a couple of times, then recover and let the student have a go.

When the student repeats the exercise, tell him to lower the nose enough that the symptoms go away, raise the nose so that they come back, etc, exactly as you've just demonstrated.

Then, take the controls, and demonstrate the recovery: lower the nose exactly the same amount as before, whilst simulatenously adding full power and controlling any yaw with rudder. Gradually raise the nose to the Vy attitude and climb away. After the demonstration, get the student to repeat the exercise.

Once the student has mastered the recover from the incipient stall, it's time to look at the full stall. Get the student to enter the stall, up to the incipient point, the same as before. Once the stall warner sounds, take the controls and demonstrate that, if you continue to try to maintain height without recovering, you enter the full stall. Point out the features of the full stall - heavy buffet, lowering of the nose, rate of descent, possible wing-drop.

Demonstrate that lowering the nose will stop all the symptoms of the full stall, just the same as it did for the incipient stall, but that you need to lower the nose a little more this time. Then demonstrate the full stall recovery, which is exactly the same as the incipient stall recovery but with more lowering of the nose necessary to stop the symptoms.

Finally, get the student to repeat the exercise.

All of this will, of course, be properly briefed prior to the flight.

You specifically ask about stalls with bank. Whether the stall was entered with bank, or whether the bank has occured due to wing-drop, the recovery is exactly the same as without bank, but once the symptoms of the stall have been removed (and not before) you can use aileron to level the wings.

Hope that helps,

FFF
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FFF: I agree with much of what you've written but it's incorrect to talk about the nose being high; the aircraft can stall in any attitude and the nose may or may not be high. For erect stalls "stick sufficiently far forward to unstall the wing" is more appropriate than "lower the nose".

Also, waiting for Vy before pitching-up is unnecessary and leads to excessive height loss.

HFD

i teach them to do the SSR recovery, but only to lease the back preasure.

HFD,

Agree with most of your points. "Stick sufficiently far forward to unstall the wing" is indeed better than my suggestion.

As for the nose being "high", though, I disagree. It is indeed true that the aircraft can stall in any attitude, and this is a vital piece of theory to be understood at some point - but for the purposes of Ex10bi, the nose will be high. And in the kinds of stalls which kill people (in the circuit), one of the first cues that something is not right is very often that the nose is higher than expected (a cue which many pilots ignore or don't notice, but I'm sure you agree that, as an instructor, you've noticed the nose being too high when your students are flying circuits and have attempted to rectify?)

I don't believe I said that you should wait for Vy before pitching up? What I said was that, once the symptoms of the stall have gone away, you should pitch to the Vy attitude - the pitching begins once the symptoms have gone away. If that's not clear from my post, then I hope this clarifies. :ok:

FFF
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The in and outs
 

It must be added that the aim of Ex 10/11 is NOT to teach stalling or spinning but rather to teach the student to recognise the symptoms of the onset/fully developed stall and also to seperate from the symptoms the particular characteristics of the aircraft used.
It should be a gentle exercise without macho wing drops and wham bam recoveries. The real danger of the stall is the failure to recognise it. Once all is fully understood and only then move onto recovery without loss of height from the incipient stage, with minimum further loss of height from the developed stall.
A great stress should be made on the fact that the only real danger from stalling is the failure to recognise the symptoms and to act accordingly. Also stress that the forces acting on a properly loaded aircraft will not allow it to stall on its own, it needs the aid of a pilot. The pilot should stop stalling the aircraft FIRST and then recover using the appropiate technique. Better still - do both at the same time.

Skyhigher

I see that you are an Instructor in Europe. What were you taught on your FI Course?

i was taught not to level the wings until the stall warner had stopped in my FI training. But at the school i'm teaching at now (not uk) i have been told to teach students to add power and at same time level wings and into climb. this is for incipient stalls and not full developed.

my understanding was always to lower nose until stall warner stopped no matter what. i appreciate that height might be an issue and lower nose may increase height loss if too much.

i am also in need of direction as to what to teach for stall in turns. ie.. get student to descend in base configuration, level off, start turn while raising nose.... recover.

cheers

At the incipient stage the aircraft has not stalled. SSR is to move the CC centrally forward whilst simultaneously applying full power and maintaining balance. If you do this, the nose will usually rise not lower, the effect of the power being greater than the effect of moving the CC slightly forward.

It is no different in the turn, SSR followed by rolling the wings level and clean up if you are in the base turn.

Setting up the base turn can cause some students a problem, set up the aircraft and delay the turn until the required speed is reached; many students will descend and accelerate in the turn so they need to increase the back pressure to maintain level flight until the symptoms appear.

As Whopity says - SSR at the first stall warning. Whatever it is which construes the first warning!!

Full Power and Control Column centrally forwards whilst maintaining balance until the 'recovery' attitude is attained.

The 'recovery' attitude to maintain is that achieved when whatever gave the stall warning no longer does so. No need to select huge nose down pitch attitudes - as Whopity infers, the pitch attitude may only be a tadge* less than the attitude at which the warning first occurred!

Then - and only then - level wings and recover from any descent.

*tadge = a bit more than a smidge

To add to Whopity's and BEagle's reply:

For the incipient stall, the wings are not actually stalled. I can only guess that whoever told you "to teach students to add power and at same time level wings and into climb" is mistakenly saying that, because the wings are not stalled, it's ok to level the wings?

The fact is that you are pretty close to a stall - close enough to experience one or more of the symptoms of approaching the stall. Using aileron increases the angle of attack on the upgoing wing -and if this wing is close to the stall before using aileron, it will be even closer once you start using aileron. That's why we are all saying that the symptoms must have have stopped before leveling the wings.
There are two specific, different things to teach.

The first is the theory and practice of stalls in the turn. The theory is that stall speed will increase, there is an increased chance of wing-drop, and also the recovery which we've been discussing. This can all be covered in ground-school, but should be followed by a demonstration of a full stall in the turn. There is no need for the student to repeat this demonstration.

The second is the exercise of simulating mishandling by raising the nose on the base-final turn. This is done exactly as you say (the level off in base configuration isn't necessary, but won't harm, so teach whatever you're happiest with). The student should be taught to initiate the recovery himself at the first sign of the stall (which will be the stall warner or the light buffet, whichever happens first).

FFF
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I always teach "control column centrally forward"... deals with the aileron aspect and cuts out the circumlocution.

VFE.

:uhoh: It's worth teaching people to be aware of the position of the stick/column. If it is getting near the fully aft position, the wing is about to stall irespective of speed and/or attitude.

Also, I would never teach: "pull the nose up" or "push the nose down".

From 4.1 onwards it's: "pitch up" and "pitch down".

VFE.

The sticking point
 

I'm wondering how the wit of the pilot who has got themselves into a stall, or nearly so, would be so quick of mind and exacting as to stare inside and position the stick or column to a remembered position, 'central' or otherwise! Indeed the forces on the controls will not be symetrical and will mislead.
The very good reason to deal with the angle of bank secondary to unstalling and conserving height is that the stall is the problem not turn, indeed from shallow angles of bank many aircraft at the onset of stall will quickly flick or at least roll very rapidly the other way. If the unpracticed pilot is not already completely out of their depth they will now, very quickly, become so.
During the turn the ab-initio student in particular and many infrequent flyers will look sideways across the nose and in doing so believe the nose has lowered in pitch and pull back (pitch up). It makes good sense to first recover the aircraft and then consider the angle of bank.

The 'stick position' recovery is not a recognised technique and not reliable. "Control column centrally forward until the buffet stops" (or similar wording - this one is from the Central Flying School)) is the the only sure way to recover any stal.

This is the third time this topic has come up on this forum to my knowledge. It always gets a variety of answers and techniques, a lot of which contravene the PPL syllabus and in some cases are unsafe.

Be careful of advice offered here.

:= Dan, I did not refer to a "stick position recovery". I merely said that it helps to avoid a stall if people get used to being aware of the stick position, which does not require you to look in! Typically, on a tailwind base leg the tendancy is to go through the centre-line, and pull a bit harder to correct. If you stall in that situation, the inside wing will probably stall first, (at a higher angle of attack) and at 500ft this would be a mind numbing experience for most pilots. You can almost paint a line on the cockpit side-wall, and if the stick is forward of that, the wing will not be stalled. Try it. Again, I am not talking about stall recovery here, just avoidance, using a simple method that is easily picked up even if the pilot is under considerable stress. It is all part of the armoury to safe flying.

slightly off tac
 

I am just glad that we all are talking about stalling the aircraft.

This is slightly off the subject but related to the above statement.

I have taken PPL holders on check out rides and asked then to fully stall the aircraft. On more than one occasion they kept recovering on the stall warner.

On closer questioning they said that they have never fully stalled the aircraft and/or experienced a wing drop, which is pretty likely with 30 degrees of flap and 1500 rpm, therefore never recovered from one.

Sorry, I should have said most of this is in a C152. Someone was bound to retort with, 'you charlatan, if you do that in a xxxx, you could end up in the ground like a tent peg'.

Just wondering if anyone else has had the same experience.

I am also finding this. I have done 3 licence revalidation flights this week and not one of the students was confident about fully stalling the aircraft claiming that during training they always recovered at the stall warner.
I think this is symptamatic of the low hours Instructors doing FI courses to hour build. We teach from experiance and a couple of hundred hours in a lot of cases is not enough experiance to pass on. I have flown with a few of these FI's who won't push the envelope through fear of not being able to recover.

Which is why it's best to get your FIC done with a quality instructor and not scrimp and save by going abroad. My FIC course cost over £6000 and the instructor made me cover stalling and spinning (especially) until I was literally ill.... no limitations with minimum course hours either. He put me forward for the skills test when he was happy. My £6000 covered the course duration regardless of the number of hours it took for him to be satisfied and I have to say that is a very responsible way to conduct these courses, which are quite often wrongly viewed as a win/win no-fail breeze-through by many in the industry....

As a result, I feel confident of recovering from a student instigated bodge up and do not fanny about with my fingers ready to ponce at the controls all day, everyday, which must get throroughly knackering if you ask me - I've seen how some other low houred FI's behave like worried mothers and it's obvious this spawns from inadequate FIC training. Funnily enough though, they seem to know the LASORS back to front and notice the students wonky tie.... in short, all non-vital bumflufferies which obviously got over egged to the detriment of the proper stuff at some point, again, most likely during their FIC training.

VFE.