Tim Bengtson wrote:

Beyond the stall, the airplane will begin losing altitude; that much
everyone agrees on. If it were truly "falling", as if the wings were
not there, it would accelerate until it reached terminal velocity (I
believe a speed over 10000 ft/min). That doesn't happen. Instead, the
vertical speed (in a bugsmasher) goes to some considerably smaller value
and sits there. Since the airplane is travelling in a straight line at
constant speed, the wing must not only be producing lift, it must be
producing exactly as much lift as it ever did--namely, the weight of the
plane. (I'm neglecting additional lift from the fuselage, prop, etc. I
think as a first approximation this is legal.)

If lift truly went away at the stall, pilots would *beg* to enter spins,
just to slow the plane down.

When I owned my Pitts Special, one of the exercises that my aerobatic coach had
me do frequently was precision turns to ground reference headings using nothing
but rudder. What made them interesting was the requirement that the airplane had
to be kept in a fully stalled condition while making those turns, which of course
meant that they were all done during a descent. Clearly there is a significant
amount of lift produced by an airfoil which has exceeded the critical angle of
attack. Whether an aircraft can maintain a certain altitude or attitude beyond
the critical angle of attack is a function of the thrust it can create from its
powerplant.

Going back to the remark made by the instructor (which I didn't catch, although
I've seen a few episodes of the show), I'm not inclined to denounce his
technically inaccurate remark. When you take a five hour student pilot up and
introduce stalls, you must make very basic explanations, sometimes filling in the
blanks later down the line (or later in the lesson.) I doubt that 'Kyle' would
have been ready to listen to a dissertation on aerodynamics at that moment in the
flight.

-Ryan
CFII-A/MEI/CFI-H