Most pilots have a great deal of faith in their airplanes. We care for them, we inspect them, we baby them, and they faithfully carry us from one place to another. We know the operating limitations of our airplanes and we know what kind of forces they can take. We feel safe in the airplanes we fly and so we should; most of us will never really be in an aviation emergency. So why, then, do we spend so much time in training practicing for emergency situations?
Most of the things that go wrong in an airplane are caused not by hardware failures but by our own mistakes. That’s why when we practice recovering from an engine failure, for example, we start by ensuring that we aren’t trying to pull fuel from an empty tank and that we didn’t forget to enrich the mixture during our descent. That’s also why we spend several hours learning to recover from unusual attitudes and stalls.
I remember practicing power-off stalls with my flight instructor early in my flight training—cutting the throttle, maintaining my altitude, putting the flaps in, watching my airspeed drop, and waiting for the telltale signs of the developing stall. My instructor would have me call out the signs as they appeared: “The controls are mushy; tail is buffeting; stall horn; waiting, waiting, waiting, stall—well, I guess that’s a stall; recover.”
It seemed to take forever for the stall to actually break and I remember thinking, Man, you’d have to be a complete imbecile to actually stall one of these things by accident. In practice, it always took a great deal of time and effort to bring the airplane to a stalling angle of attack—there was no way it would ever happen to me.
Not long after I earned my private pilot certificate, I learned just how quickly a stall can develop and how easy it is to get into optimal spin conditions.
I was on a business trip to Seattle to do some relationship building with one of our biggest clients. My boss told me that a friend of his was a pilot and that it might be a good PR activity to go flying with him. Like any good pilot, I jumped at the chance for a free flight—especially a flight around Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Washington.
After a short cross-country and a little sightseeing, we arrived at Friday Harbor. We crossed midfield to enter a right downwind for Runway 16. Everything seemed to be going relatively well so far, but when I looked down at the runway I couldn’t help but think, This sure is a tight pattern. Maybe he’ll just take a long downwind and swing out wide turning final.
About that time, and much to my surprise, he turned base—too high, too fast, and too clean. I looked over at the threshold and thought, There’s no way he’s going make that runway from here.
When I realized we weren’t going to make the runway, he did too—but when I would have gone around he decided some fancy maneuvering could salvage the approach. He rolled us into a 45-degree bank and chopped the throttle. In a steep turn the increased wing loading causes the airplane to stall at a higher airspeed. An airplane turns by redirecting some component of vertical lift to the horizontal vector. As a result, some of the lift that is supposed to be holding the airplane up is no longer there. Without power and with much of our lift directed into the turn, the airplane nosed toward the ground.
At this point, he realized we were still going to overshoot final so to hurry the turn along, he stomped on the right rudder and we began skidding dramatically. The airplane nosed down even more and we were picking up airspeed. In a skidding turn, the inside wing is moving much slower and is producing more drag than the outside wing; therefore, when the airplane approaches stall conditions, the inside wing will stall well before the outside wing. If the inside wing stalls and drops, but the outside wing does not stall, then the unstalled wing becomes what is sometimes called the “driving” wing during the ensuing spin. During a steep turn—even a coordinated steep turn—faster airflow over the outside wing causes the airplane to continue rolling into the bank, even with the controls neutralized. This effect is appropriately called the overbanking tendency.
So at this point, we’re in a 45-degree skidding turn going right from downwind through base and onto final. We’re without power and we’re descending fast. My pilot noticed that our descent rate had increased rapidly, and although he was determined to put us right on the numbers, he also wanted the landing gear to remain intact, so he tried to slow our descent. The problem was, he tried to stop our dive by doing exactly the wrong thing; he yanked back on the yoke—in a small airplane, especially one close to the ground, the elevator is not your altitude control and it is certainly not your rate of descent control. The elevator is your airspeed control and the power is your altitude control. When he pulled back on the yoke, he selected an angle of attack for a much slower airspeed and he traded critical airspeed for altitude.
Our airspeed started to bleed off and the right wing started dipping; we were about to spin in. The left wing was pulling us over and once again, the pilot did exactly the wrong thing—he whipped the yoke as far to the left as he could, throwing the right aileron down into the airstream. When the aileron sticks down into the airstream it changes the camber of the wing tip section to increase lift. The increased lift comes with a byproduct that is particularly nasty when you’re fatally close to a stall: induced drag. The increased drag slows down the wing even more, deepens the stall, and accelerates rotation.
I got to the flight controls with not a second to spare and I shouted, “My airplane!” I neutralized the ailerons to kill the induced drag and adverse yaw and I neutralized the rudder. I pushed the nose over to pick up airspeed and when I had enough airspeed to overcome the drag of the rudder, I added hard left rudder and I leveled the wings. I applied power and recovered from the stall maybe 200 feet from the ground.
We flew a lap or two around the pattern in silence while I regained my composure and prepared for a nice, safe approach and landing. I thought about what I was going to say to my boss when I got home; I thought about how I was going to explain to my pilot that he wasn’t allowed to fly us home; I thought about my friends and my family; and I thought about my flight training.
I had practiced stalls over and over again with power on, with power off, during a turn, and even with the Foggles on. I still had no idea how quickly everything could fall apart. In the time it took me to get my hands and feet to the flight controls, the airplane went from an awkward approach to a near incident.
My advice for any pilot is to periodically take specialized spin training (sometimes called unusual attitude training). Have an instructor put you in spin-prone situations to see and feel how quickly the airplane will roll over. Get into a spin or a deep stall and play with the controls to learn what effect they will have. Find out how much altitude is lost in only one rotation, in two rotations, and in three. Know exactly what it feels like to recover from a spin. This kind of training will give you a greater understanding of what a spin is, what it feels like, how it develops—and how you get out of it. More important, but perhaps less obvious, spin training will teach you how to avoid finding yourself in a spin to begin with.
“Learning Experiences” is presented to enhance safety by providing a forum for students and pilots to learn from the experiences of others. It is intended to provoke thought and discussion, acknowledging that actions taken by the authors were not necessarily the best choices under the circumstances. We encourage you to discuss any questions you have about a particular scenario with your with your flight instructor.
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