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Is every touchdown a stall?
Listening to the radio transmissions of a VFR pilot who had a panic
attack in a cloud of IMC, I heard him mention to a controller that "the stall horn goes off every time I land." I thought that was bizarre. Is a touchdown supposed to be a stall? My stall horn doesn't sound on landing. When I first started landing in the sim (after it had advanced enough to allow realistic landings), I sometimes stalled the aircraft (but without an alarm). Later I came to the conclusion that this might not be good. If the aircraft stalls, you lose control of it right above the runway. You can't pitch down to pick up speed and restore lift, and the engines cannot speed up quickly enough to pull you out of the stall, either. Unless you are inches above the runway, you come banging down onto it, and in my case I've collapsed the gear many times this way. So I figured that stalling on landing might not be the way to do. These days I try to stay above stall speed throughout the landing, even during the flare. The flare arrests my descent, but does not stall the aircraft. I reduce throttle at the same time as the flare so that I naturally tend to begin a gentle descent, and this seems to set me down very nicely on the runway, although it takes longer this way (but small aircraft usually don't need the whole runway, anyway). And if anything goes wrong, I can power up and pull away without delay, since I haven't stalled. So, which is the preferred way to land, and why? -- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail. |
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