A letter I sent to the Wings Channel

"Tim Bengtson" wrote in message
...snip...

I don't watch the show regularly, but have channel-surfed into the
middle of two different episodes and heard what I consider glaring
errors both times. The first time, during stall practice, he pointed out
that the wing stops producing lift at the stall. This is absolutely
incorrect; lift is maximum at the stall.

According to my textbooks that's not true. Maximum lift is just before the
stall. Once in the stalled condition itself, at or beyond the separation
point of the flow of air over the airfoil, lift is lost and "the airplane
ceases to fly." (From The Ground Up, Aviation Publishers, Ottawa, page 35
and Flight Training Manual, Transport Canada, page 75) Of course not all
lift is gone - if you want to get picky about it, even a dropped brick has
SOME lift - but what does remain is insufficient to support the weight of
the airplane and as you said in another message, the airplane is indeed
falling rather than flying. Thus "at the stall" would be the point at which
the wing stops producing (adequate) lift, just as he said.

This weekend he was talking
about what to do during an engine failure in the pattern, and said that
the first thing you want to do is get on the radio and let someone know
you're in trouble. I don't know about you, but if I had an engine
failure in the pattern, I would be so busy flying the plane that I might
not talk on the radio again until I was on the ground.

I sure wouldn't start switching frequencies or grabbing for a hand mike
either but if my finger was next to the PTT switch on the yoke anyway I'd
holler that I had a problem.


As to on-camera silence, how about a voice-over? For my part, silence
would be better than listening to this guy blather on incessantly about
every piece of minutia that entered his mind. If I had an instructor
talk to me like that, I'd tell him to shut up.

Having never heard that minutia before I find it pretty interesting and that
it complements my ground school materials and CFI quite well. And since
that's the subject of the program it doesn't make a lot of sense to edit it
out.


Tim