Right seat: Shake off stalls

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Thousands of student pilots do suffer from fear of stalls, and it’s an unnecessary and curable malady. The cause is easy to identify, if hard to treat.

Much of what we teach about stalls is wrong. Not technically wrong, but wrong for what teachers call transfer of learning. It starts with the name. How many times do we have to write in Flight Training that a stall has nothing to do with the engine? Car engines stall, so it’s only natural for new students to think they’re going to practice dropping out of the sky as the engine fails. “Stall” refers to the interruption of airflow over the wings. I’m not sure that’s any more comforting to students already afraid of the term. I don’t have a better word for what happens when the airflow begins to separate from the wing, drag is increased significantly, and the airplane mushes down.

Most training courses call for stalls to be introduced within the first few lessons, and short of the instructor’s guidance, there usually isn’t much to prepare the student for what’s going to happen next. You can watch videos, which helps. So does simulation. But sitting in the seat a half-mile above the Earth and briefly feeling your stomach push up toward your chest on the recovery can’t be fully simulated, studied, or observed. You’ve gotta be there to experience it.

If all a student had to face were the scary names, concepts, and those initial feelings, I think most would get over it pretty quickly. The real problem for many students is that their instructor models fear.

It’s a bad cycle: Instructors are taught by other instructors who were taught by their instructors—generation after generation of pilots who have been afraid to fully explore an airplane’s envelope. And let’s be clear: A one-G, straight-ahead power-off or power-on stall is not exploring the envelope. It’s one small part of what an airplane is capable of and what it will do when controlled in a certain way. Fully exploring the airplane is doing accelerated stalls, aggressive turning stalls, secondary stalls, stalls with aggressive cross-controlling, and all sorts of other maneuvers.

Students don’t have to experience these more advanced stalls, but instructors should be comfortable doing them. Better yet, they should be comfortable doing them all inverted. Like most pilots, I was afraid of stalls. My solo stall practice was nothing more than slow flight with the stall warning horn on. It wasn’t until doing snap rolls, running out of energy and tumbling at the top of a loop, and doing inverted spins that I came to truly feel comfortable in what an airplane is capable of. Obviously a Cessna 172 isn’t going to do these things. If performing some advanced aerobatic maneuvers in a proper airplane is the NBA finals, normal stalls are like a game of driveway H-O-R-S-E. Most students don’t need to make it past basic stalls, but if the instructor has been there/done that, watching someone drop a wing on a power-on stall is no big deal.

The intent of all this practice is not to be able to perform stalls on a checkride, although that’s a good bonus. It’s to be comfortable enough to get beyond the mechanics of the maneuver so you can recognize all the other subtle clues the airplane is giving you, and respond appropriately and without fear. And that will make you a healthy pilot.