Thursday, October 4, 2012

How to Break a Stall

Back when I was learning to fly planes, an integral part of training was learning how to stall the plane and then recover.  I hated this training at first.  It's arguably one of the most violent things a beginning pilot needs to learn to do, and it scared me witless.  See, there's a rule of thumb that if you don't stall, you can't spin.  You have to stall before you can spin, and you don't want to spin unless you're an acrobatic pilot, which I was not.  I didn't want to spin!

Luckily for me, maybe, spinning isn't on the syllabus for a beginner pilot.  But stalls are.

There are two kinds of stalls I learned: Power-On and Power-Off, and if you're going to get a pilots license, you do a lot of stalls, because it needs to be a reflex, it needs to be entrenched in the reptilian part of the brain.  In a stall, especially if you've let it happen close to the ground, there's no time to think.  Deliberation can mean death.  It's counter-intuitive, a little bit, to think that when you're stalling, and the plane's sinking, to push the nose down, but that's how you break the stall.  You have to descend a little bit (quickly) in order to get your airspeed back up and climb at all.  If you pull back on the yoke and make the nose go even higher, your stall's just going to get worse and the ground's just going to get closer.

Power-Off stalls, which teach you what to do if you stall too soon during landing, are initially easier to put the plane into, because you configure the plane for landing (flaps down, gear down if you have retractable gear, mixture rich, throttle to idle), then glide to the appropriate airspeed and pull the yoke back until the plane starts to buffet and your stall horn is going off in your ear or your stall light is blinking like crazy.  Welcome to the stall!

How to fix it is you smoothly push the yoke forward to push the nose of the plane down, push in the throttle, and gradually get the flaps back up and get back up to airspeed.

Power-On stalls are meant to simulate stalling on take-off.  I hated these the most, because they are terrifying, especially in a Tomahawk, which have the reputation of having the tail fall off.  My flight instructor always called our bird the "Traumahawk."  Anyway, Power-On stalls are where you configure the plane for take-off, then let the throttle rip, and pull back on the yoke to make the plane go nose-high until it buffets, buffets, buffets, b-u-u-u-u-ffets, and then you just nose down to break the stall and gain your airspeed.

The trick to both stalls is that to get up to spiffy for any checkride or flight review, a private pilot has to stall and recover within 100 feet of the altitude you were at when the stall began.  At first blush, this seems like some pain in the butt impossible feat to pull off to impress the hell out of somebody from the FAA.  Well, and this is what made stalls the most terrifying thing for me, was that you practice them over and over again so that if it happens on take-off or landing, you won't have hundreds of feet below you to play with, to get your stall broken and recover enough not to crash.

Once I got over being so afraid of the buffeting, and I got onto how to break the stalls and recover, and what do you know, even do so well within the test standards, it was empowering.  That's not to say that my mouth didn't go dry whenever it was time to "do stalls."  Just because I found stalls empowering, doesn't mean I learned to love them.  Ever. 

It kind of applies out of an airplane, too, when you're in some kind of stall of the psyche.  Happens to me a lot, those stalls of the psyche.  The thing I find is that when I pull back on the yoke, doing what's logical or what I think is right sometimes just makes the stall worse.  Sometimes I have to do the thing that seems like the worst thing ever to do when I'm on the way to crashing back to earth, pushing the nose down, to get my momentum back, to break the stall.

The good thing about it is that just like in the airplane, the more I break my stalls of the psyche, the more automatic it becomes.

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