Flying Lesson 6-7

Hi all,

In these lessons I was due to be covering stalling and I was seriously excited as I turned up at Denham airfield to go flying once again. This lesson was going to really show how the aircraft handles in a clean (and unclean) stall.

I headed out and was soon up in the air once again after doing a full check up of the aircraft. We headed out past the Heathrow zone so we could then ascend up to 2500ft, which is a safe height to practice stalling with two persons on board.

First of all I was shown a clean stall and it was interesting to see how the plane handles during a stall and then it was my turn. I brought the power back to idle and held the nose attitude high to maintain our height rather than sinking. The airspeed dropped back all the way to 60knots and at this point the aircraft started buffeting. The airspeed then dropped down to 55knots, the stall warning came on telling me that we were about to stall and soon after that I felt the plane just about to drop away and so I dipped the nose forward, applied full power and after quickly gaining more airspeed I leveled off.

That was my first time at the controls of a clean stall and I sure learnt a lot! A stall can quite easily happen during the stages of approach so it is very important to drum in all the techniques of getting out of a stall. I practiced this numerous times and we headed back down to the airfield.

After a bite of lunch we were up and away again and I had an even bigger grin on my face than before. This time I was going to practice stalling whilst in a turn and then just gliding out of it.

Once out of the controlled airspace and after finding a quiet stretch of airspace I was led through the effects of stalling whilst turning. What happens is that, as the plane loses air over the wings, the plane loses lift and the lower wing drops away. If I wasn’t expecting it, it would probably have been quite a surprise! I also ran through stalls whilst climbing. I also did stalls and then just glided out of them.

One of the last stalls we did was really just an exercise to show me how the plane will effectively fix it’self if balanced. We let the plane stall, and as the nose dropped away, we let it go into a partial dive to increase the airspeed over the wings and once this happened the airplane started to level herself out impressively without any help from us. What a feeling as we lost a thousand feet in seconds!

Mike