Emergency landing today Troutdale, OR

Margy Natalie wrote:
Peter R. wrote:
On 2/1/2007 9:12:05 AM, "Gig 601XL Builder" wrote:
gatt, call your local news station and give them an atta'boy for not
saying the engine stalled.

But in this case it appears that the engine did just that.

It didn't stall, it quit. Airplane engines don't stall, airplane
wings stall, airplane engines quit. It's an english thing.

Alas for aviation, the word "stall" probably had as one of its many
meanings that of engine stoppage long before airplanes came on the scene.
So it is perhaps either inappropriate or futile to ask people to drop
that meaning from the word. Context would normally disambiguate things;
e.g. "the airplane engine stalled" or "the wing stalled" are pretty
unambiguous, but "the airplane stalled" is ambiguous as to meaning
without further context. There are an awful lot of meanings to the word
"stall" and entering "define:stall" into Google (or looking into a decent
print dictionary) yields:

Stall:

* procrastinate: postpone doing what one should be doing; "He did not
want to write the letter and procrastinated for days"
* a compartment in a stable where a single animal is confined and fed
* come to a stop; "The car stalled in the driveway"
* booth: small area set off by walls for special use
* a booth where articles are displayed for sale
* deliberately delay an event or action; "she doesn't want to write the
report, so she is stalling"
* put into, or keep in, a stall; "Stall the horse"
* a malfunction in the flight of an aircraft in which there is a sudden
loss of lift that results in a downward plunge; "the plane went into a
stall and I couldn't control it"
* experience a stall in flight, of airplanes
* seating in the forward part of the main level of a theater
* carrel: small individual study area in a library
* cause an airplane to go into a stall
* cause an engine to stop; "The inexperienced driver kept stalling the
car"
* a tactic used to mislead or delay