Ol Shy & Bashful wrote:
Why is it so many pilots are afraid of stalls? I see it over an over
when doing flight reviews and checks. Why are pilots so afraid of
flying in the low end of the speed envelope? Isn't that where the
nasty things can happen? Isn't that where a pilot should be
comfortable and competent?
What do you think?


Think about a stall in a typical light trainer. The controls get mushy, the
nose is usually unnaturally high and the stall horn typically rises in both
volume and pitch the closer you get. It's not by accident that horror film
soundtracks do essentially the same thing. Then there's the fear that the thing
will get away from you and snap into some sort of unrecoverable regime.

I think it's quite natural to be afraid of stalls. Now, how to change that?

Do them... lots of them. Remove the unusualness of the stall from your
experience bank. Make them commonplace. Then not only do you stop fearing
them, you come to easily recognize the way aircraft behave as they approach the
stall.

With this I think you have to include a bit of spin recovery training. If you
know that the worst the stall can do is put you into a ho-hum spin, easy to
recover, then what's left to worry about?

As an aside, I prefer the old stall warning light over the horn. I can
effectively ignore it so that I can more properly concentrate on how the
aircraft feels. YMMV.



--
Mortimer Schnerd, RN
mschnerdatcarolina.rr.com