On Aug 22, 8:34*pm, Bruce Hoult wrote:
On Aug 23, 1:50*am, John Cochrane
wrote:

You can have a student with
great coordination and glidepath control at altitude, and who can
explain everything perfectly on oral quizzing. Then, things get a
little tight in the pattern, like he's too close and too low. His
attention gets focused elsewhere and stress goes up, and next thing
you know the yaw string is right over to the side on base to final and
he wants to pull the stick back.

That's another one which I've asked about here before, but no one has
ever answered.

Around here we have ridges and students are very likely to have quite
a bit of practice at doing well-banked coordinated turns while a lot
closer to the ground than normal base-to-final turns, in the presence
of considerable wind drift, groundspeed higher than airspeed
(approaching the ridge from upwind) etc.

Is there correlation between screwed-up base to final turns and
flatland fliers?

Quite possibly. Mountain pilots know they can't trust the horizon so
they learn to control pitch attitude with airspeed and bank with rate
of turn. Mountain flying requires a bit of instrument skills. I've
ridden with pilots who were trying to keep their wings parallel to
sloping ground and point their nose at mountain peaks. Airports like
Leadville and Teluride in Colorado are notorious for inducing false
attitude illusions.

Taking this a bit further into the technical - I've set up turn-to-
final stall/spin scenarios while practicing stalls at altitude. The
result is almost always a wing drop followed by a spiral dive. The
glider is designed to resist spinning so it recovers from the
incipient spin on it's own it the first eighth of a turn leading to a
spiral dive.

If the student applies spin recovery control inputs in a spiral dive,
it gets VERY "interesting". This has led me to wonder if some so
called "stall/spin" accidents are really mis-handled spiral dive
recoveries. Maybe we should take a careful look at what we are
teaching.