Dear Rod:
How do you feel about letting post-solo students do stall practice on their own? Our chief pilot is not a fan of letting students do this by themselves. May I ask your opinion and the reasoning behind it?
—Dustin
Greetings Dustin:
Students have safely practiced stalls for decades and I don’t see why they shouldn’t continue to do so as long as they understand the principles of stall recognition and recovery. Students must understand why they need to keep the inclinometer’s ball (or slip-skid trapezoid) centered up until the point of stall. A skidding entry into a stall can result in one wing stalling before the other, which can lead to a spin. Students also need to know that if one wing does stall before the other, their automatic reaction must be to reduce the angle of attack with the elevator and simultaneously use rudder to stop the yawing motion. They shouldn’t try raising a stalled or stalling wing with the aileron.
With those concepts hard wired, students aren’t likely to spook themselves sufficiently to look like they had their hair styled with a Van de Graaff generator. I don’t, however, recommend allowing students to perform departure stalls (or power-on stalls) on their own until they’ve demonstrated skill at spin entry and recovery techniques.
Dear Rod:
I have been training for my private for about four months now. I’m training in a Cessna 172 and have 35.3 hours of instruction, but I haven’t soloed. I can land the airplane well and have no problems with crosswinds. Even my instructor says I’m doing a great job, but he is reluctant to solo me. He is a new instructor. I’m only his second student and I think he just doesn’t have the confidence to let me go alone. At least this is what a few of the other instructors I’ve talked to at the flight school seem to think. Do you have any suggestions as to how I might handle this issue?
Thank you in advance,
—Kate
Greetings Kate:
Here’s what I suggest. Since you feel that you are indeed ready to solo, you need to prove it to your instructor and get the instructor to believe the proof. No, don’t solo yourself then take a video of it and say to your instructor, “Look! Here’s proof that I can do it,” because he’ll probably show you proof that he can make an FAA inspector appear at the flight school.
What you should do is ask your instructor to sit in the right seat for a half-hour and promise to say nothing as you demonstrate your ability to safely make takeoffs and landings. Yep, make him promise not to utter a peep (or a repeep) unless you’re about to do something illegal or something that might vaporize the entire airplane and its valuable contents.
Then, let the demonstration of skill begin. Make your point. At the end of several pattern circuits, pull into the runup area and tell him that if you’re not ready to solo after that, it’s clear you’ll never be ready to solo in his eyes. Sometimes this is what you have to do when working with a new instructor. If that doesn’t work, then ask him to let you be evaluated by a third-party instructor for a second opinion. One of these strategies should be effective.
Dear Rod:
I have trouble hearing high-frequency sound. As a result, I have a problem hearing the stall warning horn. Do you have any suggestions?
—Mr. N
Greetings Mr. N:
There’s not much I can recommend about the hearing problem, but I’m not at all concerned that you can’t hear the horn. In fact, you don’t need the horn to know or even sense when the airplane is approaching a stall. You can tell this by how the control response feels and the general mushiness of the airplane, along with the increase in g-force that is always associated with an increase in stall speed. I wouldn’t worry about not hearing the stall horn, but I would compensate by developing my confidence at landing an airplane without having to look at your airspeed indicator. You’ll need a good instructor to help you train this way, but it will be well worth it.
Related Articles
