Re: accelerated stalls

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

At 11:54 PM 10/31/01 -0500, Hugh Haskell wrote:
> If you are going to slow for the angle of bank, the airplane can stall.
> Fun to do at altitude, but really scary if it happens as you turn onto
> your final approach during landing when you are only a couple of hundred
> feet up.
>
> I'm sure John D. can tell you of at least one instance where a student did
> it to him.

Don't be so sure.  In thousands of landings, I've never been anywhere close
to the situation described.  And I plan to keep it that way.

> Probably only one, though, since that is a lesson that you learn very well
> the first time-if you survive.

Flight training does _not_ depend on learning from barely-survivable
incidents.  Flight training depends on using safe methods to teach you how
to stay away (well away) from any barely-survivable situations.

> I'm sure that was the kind of stall that little girl who was trying to
> solo across the country a couple of years ago, when she spun in soon after
> takeoff from Cheyenne, Wyo.

Don't be so sure.  Available records suggest there was a stall, but not a
spin (as alleged above) or even an accelerated stall (as alleged farther
above).

  http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001208X05676&key=1
  http://www.avweb.com/sponsors/ntsbrepo/dubroff.html

Furthermore, there was no little girl flying "solo".  There were three
people on board.  There was one and only one pilot on board.  The pilot
wasn't a little girl.  As pilot in command, he was directly responsible
for, and the
final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.

Media hype about the little girl has no legal or practical
significance.  The pilot made a series of outrageously bad decisions --
well beyond the bounds of ordinary reasonable judgement and beyond the
bounds of the regulations several times over.

> Turning when you are low, slow and heavy can get you into really big
> trouble very fast, especially if you are inexperienced.

This is an unhelpful mixture of ideas.
 -- Being outside the certified weight&balance envelope is a bad
idea.  Being inexperienced is no excuse, and being experienced is no
justification.
 -- Failure to maintain safe altitude is a really bad idea.  There's no
excuse for this, either.
 -- Failure to maintain a safe airspeed is also a really bad idea,
although what's safe and what's not depends somewhat on altitude and other
factors.
 -- Et cetera.

Please don't go telling stories about all the horrible things that can
happen in airplanes -- you're scaring my customers away.  There are in fact
three envelopes:
  1) The actual limits of safety.
  2) The stuff we do with advanced students, by informed consent of all
concerned, under controlled conditions, which explores SOME of the limits
of what the airplane can do.  This is very far within the aforementioned
safety limits;  for instance, it might involve stalling the airplane at
3000 feet when we know it takes 50 feet to get it unstalled if everything
goes right and 200 feet if everything goes wrong, leaving at least 2800
feet to spare.
  3) The stuff we do with passengers, and with beginning students, which
is a tiny subset of what the airplane (and the properly-trained pilot) can
handle.