passed Commercial checkride yesterday!

gatt wrote:

On the way back he also discussed how he thought the Private Pilot
curriculum ought to put more emphasis on stall avoidance rather than
recovery; teach 'em how to recover, but more importantly, teach them how to
recognize that they're headed for a stall situation before they get there.
He said when you're learning stall recovery, you're watching the airspeed
and slowly anticipating the deliberate stall; in reality, he says, people's
reaction time often makes it impossible to recover from a stall because
unlike in training they weren't prepared for it to happen. In those cases
it would have been better had they been trained to identify and correct an
impending stall situation and avoid it before it became necessary to try a
sudden stall recovery.

This is something of a mystery to me as
well. I've spent most of my stall training
dancing on the rudder keeping the nose
pointed straight. It's occurred to me
that rather than playing with an impending
stall, I should develop the habit of breaking
it right away.

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:27:08 -0700, Jim Stewart wrote:

This is something of a mystery to me as well. I've spent most of my stall
training dancing on the rudder keeping the nose pointed straight.

You're sure this is "stall training" as opposed to "slow flight"? The
latter serves a different purpose than merely learning how to recover from
stalls.

It's
occurred to me that rather than playing with an impending stall, I
should develop the habit of breaking it right away.

That's what my stall training was all about. However, this developed
something of a fear of stalls in me. I subsequently did spin training.
This helped a lot with the stall fear (since I'd experienced the "bad
thing that could happen"). But not completely.

Then I "checked out" a CFI before I let him fly with my wife. We did PPL
PTS stuff, including stalls. He noticed how rushed I was in breaking the
stall, and concluded - correctly - that I was too apprehensive. So we sat
in a stall for a while. Unlike my spin training, we stayed coordinated.
And nothing happened (but for some altitude loss {8^).

So while the habit of breaking a stall right away is a good one, it's also
a good idea to get at least somewhat comfortable with it as well.

- Andrew