Accident report: Capability exceeded

The power-on stall task in the Private Pilot Airman Certification Standards emphasizes safe altitude awareness for practicing the maneuver, and lists 10 other elements of stall knowledge that an applicant must be able to demonstrate.

Two of the knowledge demonstrations involve understanding how the maneuver relates to a normal flight, and a “rationale for power-setting variances.” One of those variances is described in the Airplane Flying Handbook, which notes that “power for practicing the takeoff stall recovery should be maximum power, although for some airplanes, as noted, it may be reduced to a setting that will prevent an excessively high pitch attitude.”

April 2, 2016, was a cold day with calm winds at Guthrie-Edmond Regional Airport in Guthrie, Oklahoma, when a pilot learned about departure stalls the hard way after taking off in an Experimental Bowers Fly Baby 1A.

“The pilot reported that during the initial climb, the airplane aerodynamically stalled,” said the National Transportation Safety Board’s accident report. “He reported that he was unable to recover the airplane due to the low altitude and the airplane impacted a field off the departure end of the runway. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage, right wing, and right elevator.”

A safety recommendation in the report from the 2,300-hour pilot with about 174 hours in the make and model “reported that using full power on takeoff would have prevented the accident.”

As for other ways to prevent stall-after-takeoff scenarios, the NTSB quoted liberally from the FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook’s discussion of stalls—putting notable focus on angle-of-attack awareness.

The key, the text points out, is for a pilot to be able to visualize the angle of attack “in any particular circumstance and thereby be able to estimate his/her margin of safety above stall.” The skill must be acquired early in flight training, and visualizing the angle-of-attack scenario is essential “prior to entering any flight maneuver.”

It’s a figure of speech to describe any individual occurrence as a textbook accident, but in this case the NTSB’s citing of training-text topics covered the particulars while providing an avoidance tutorial for any pilot: “The pilot must understand and appreciate factors such as airspeed, pitch attitude, load factor, relative wind, power setting, and aircraft configuration in order to develop a reasonably accurate mental picture of the wing’s angle of attack at any particular time.”

Can you accomplish the recommended mental picture? Be sure that your practice of slow flight and stall approaches and recoveries gives you an understanding of the sights, sounds, and feel of this flight realm. If you have been relying on the most basic cues—stall-warning systems and stall buffets, for instance—to alert you to your aircraft’s condition, there’s more work to do.

The stall you induce in routine training may be little more than a distant cousin of the subtle or even clueless stall that occurs at low altitude after takeoff, or the stall-with-rotation that takes you by surprise as the result of a drastic or sloppy maneuver such as a hard (and probably uncoordinated) turn after overshooting a final approach on landing. (Remember that increasing load factor with a steep bank angle will bring you closer to the critical angle of attack.)

Here’s a related consideration: mindful of the risk of a stall at low altitude after takeoff, enhance your margin by climbing—at recommended power—to a safe altitude promptly, using the appropriate operating speed for the departure scenario.

eMedia Associate Editor Dan Namowitz has been a pilot since 1985 and an instructor since 1990.