Stalls, steep turns, circles around an island - Part 3 of 5 of 'The Student Experience'
When Tyler told me we'd be learning stall recovery on our fourth flight my throat tightened, my palms began to drip with perspiration, and my knees shook to a Samba rhythm. He walked me through the steps: carburetor heat on; throttle back to 1,500 rpm; full flaps; and once the airspeed drops below 55 kt, power off and then try to maintain altitude by applying gentle back-pressure on the yoke. It seemed straightforward, but as with everything else in flying it would all be about feel.
While he demonstrated a stall I noticed how the angle of attack -- or the angle between the relative wind and an imaginary line running from the wing's leading edge to the trailing edge -- had to increase in order for the wings to generate enough lift to keep us at our altitude. (Relative wind moves opposite to the flight path.) This I had of course learned in ground school, but seeing it and feeling the airplane go through the motions made it clearer.
As the aircraft's control surfaces began to lose their aerodynamic qualities, I noticed a slight buffet in the yoke and rudder pedals.
"Do you feel that?" Tyler asked, as the stall warning sent its high-pitched shriek around the cabin.
Before I could answer, the airplane stopped flying and the nose suddenly dipped toward the ground. I clenched my seat with a death grip, but in a moment it was all over and we were flying again.
"See? Nothing to it. Your turn!"
We humans are inherently afraid of the unknown, especially if it involves an airplane that stops flying and seems to plunge toward the ground. But after seeing it for myself and reading Wolfgang Langewiesche's exhaustive dissection of the angle of attack in his book, Stick and Rudder, I realized that stalls were definitely preventable -- and that I could recover from one.
Understanding stalls attenuated my fear of them, but not without some practice and numerous mistakes.
On my first try, I committed the ultimate no-no. As I was taught in learning to recover from a power-off stall -- which simulates stalling the airplane during an approach to land, a phase of flight where the power setting would be low -- lowering the nose to allow air to flow over the surfaces and applying full throttle would get the aircraft flying in no time.
While I knew that, my first reflex as the nose dipped forward was to pull back on the yoke; and I disregarded the power setting, which I had completely forgotten.
At 5,000 feet, the mistake was benign, especially with a flight instructor sitting next to me. The airplane might have gone into a secondary stall and lost a little more altitude had I not released that back-pressure, but the margin to recover was ample. At traffic pattern altitude, however, a mere 1,000 feet over the ground, my reaction could have been costly.
It was an expected reaction for a new student pilot, but I was humbled and regarded the error as an important lesson. Somewhat angered by it, I set up for a second try. As I waited for the stall indication, some tension set in, but as the nose dipped I released the pressure on the yoke, applied full power, and removed the carb heat. Within a second or two we were flying again. I maintained VY -- the airspeed for best rate of climb -- and slowly retracted the flaps as I would in a go-around.
The recovery was smooth, with minimal loss of altitude. I had done it.
"Alright, power-on stalls now," came from the right seat. "The tricky ones."
This exercise simulates a stall after takeoff, when the airplane's throttle is full forward and a variety of factors cause the airplane to want to yaw left. The objective in recovering from a power-on stall is to lower the angle of attack, of course, and find the correct balance of right rudder to compensate for those left-turning tendencies and keep the airplane in coordinated flight to avoid entering a spin.
Too much rudder either way will induce yaw and cause a wing to drop, which, while in most cases harmless, can be scary.
We performed several of these over the weeks so that I would get comfortable with them. Again, gaining knowledge about them erased my fears, and I soon began to enjoy stall recoveries very much. The accrued confidence and ability to recover unaided from such situations also did wonders in boosting my confidence as a pilot.
Stalls were the primary source of concern in my training, but I'd read on Internet message boards and in magazines that some students are fearful of steep turns.
One thing you learn from the maneuver is how to handle the over-banking tendencies encountered by an airplane when it is put past a certain angle of bank. In the exercise, the airplane is banked 45 degrees and held there until 360 degrees of turn have been flown. The desired tolerances include maintaining altitude within 100 feet and rolling out within a few degrees of the entry heading.
I loved steep turns from the very first one and never had significant problems with them. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the almost 2 Gs experienced in the maneuver. As the airplane rolls that steeply, it loses vertical lift and could lose altitude. To compensate, the pilot must add back-pressure, while keeping a close eye on airspeed. The back-pressure and bank combine to push everyone in the airplane deep in their seats.
Ground reference maneuvers, on the other hand, were problematic all the way up to my checkride and were a constant source of frustration. They come in three shapes: rectangular courses, circles about a point, and S-turns across a line. Students practice these to learn how to position the aircraft in relation to an object on the ground as wind and groundspeed change. The skill is especially useful in the traffic pattern on a breezy day.
The only rectangular courses that Tyler and I practiced were in the actual airport pattern. Early in training, however, we embarked on circles around a point and S-turns. Both were major stumbling blocks.
Our first attempt at a perfect circle was on a windy day over the Wachuset Reservoir, about 15 miles west of Hanscom Field. Tyler picked a small island, which we circled several times in more of an oval pattern. Flying 1,000 feet over the water and having to bank sharply on the downwind portion of the maneuver to compensate for the drift was a little scary at first. Not to mention that I often lost sight of the island under the airplane's left wing.
The experience was disappointing. Minutes later, attempted S-turns using a nearby railroad track were even worse and frustrated me. With only a handful of hours under my belt I focused too much on flying the airplane; I felt completely overwhelmed and unable to visualize how the wind was affecting the airplane's course over the ground.
Even later in my training, the maneuvers proved infuriating. The evening before my checkride, with every step completed and requirement fulfilled, I circled a silo near Fitchburg Municipal airport for a good 20 minutes, trying hard to keep a constant distance from it. The results were mediocre at best, and I went home crushed.
The following day, with the FAA designated pilot examiner sitting next to me, I feared this would be my Achilles' heel. As expected, a circle about a point was on the menu. To make things different, he told me to enter the circle on the upwind, which I had never done before.
As I set up for the maneuver, I reviewed the bank angles in reverse, knowing I'd have to start shallow instead of steep. The winds were in the high teens, but I managed to hold a decent circle around the island we'd picked and exited with a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.
All these exercises were hard work, as were many others -- including emergency descents, engine-out procedures, slow flight, and partial-panel drills. Even though they were at times frustrating or downright frightening, I knew they would combine to make me a more precise, safer, and confident pilot.
I can't say that I have mastered any of them with a high degree of proficiency. I have, however, practiced them enough to understand their consequences and applications in everyday flying, and I was able to meet the checkride standards. But the maneuvers will always remain a part of my weekend skybound excursions, either in routine flight operations in the case of ground reference maneuvers, or periodic practice of stall recoveries, steep turns, and emergency procedures.
Maneuvers gave me the knowledge that I could handle the airplane in a variety of circumstances, and while I never took them for granted, a minor engine scare on one of my first solo flights confirmed their importance.
It must have been my fifth flight alone during training. On a bright, clear Saturday morning I excitedly headed out to the practice area where I'd planned a regimen of steep turns and ground reference maneuvers. After about an hour of airwork, I climbed to an even higher altitude and enjoyed the scenery before returning to the nest.
As I approached Bedford, Massachusetts, the engine suddenly began to run rough -- quite rough, in fact. The whole fuselage shook, and the panel moved erratically with it. I uttered a brief expletive and almost instinctively ran through a mental checklist: fuel selector on both, mixture full rich, carb heat on, primer in and locked. I checked the magnetos, but everything appeared to be normal.
Almost on downwind, I called the tower and explained the situation. Halfway through the transmission the roughness subsided, and I landed the airplane safely. While a little embarrassed that it all ended as I was talking to the controller, I was relieved and realized how the training had sunk in. Tyler's insistence on running through the checklists over and over -- and his unexpectedly closing the throttle -- had paid off in a real situation.
I had never underestimated the importance of maneuvers, but I admit that, like other students, I may have wished to spend more time doing cross-country work rather than circling a barn or gliding toward a field with the power off to simulate an emergency landing.
But with what could have easily been a real engine failure as a reminder of what can happen in the air, I understood the dire difference that maneuvers can make and pledged never to let the skills they taught me go stale.
Mark Wilkinson was a Boston journalist when he learned to fly in 2004. He enjoyed flying so much that he decided to pursue a flying career.
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Additional resources especially for student pilots working to perfect their own flight maneuvers can be found at AOPA Flight Training Online.Related Articles
