User Guide

Learning To Fly with Rod Machado

I wanted you to see this for a very important reason. It’s a common misconception to think that stalls

only occur at slow speeds. The beginning of the green arc on the airspeed indicator is the speed at

which this airplane stalls without flaps extended (more on flaps during the tutorial on landings). It is,

however, just as common for pilots to stall at higher speeds.

For instance, if you pull back too hard to correct for an excessive rate of descent while on final

approach, the airplane might stall at a higher speed. The difficulty here is that you must recover from

the stall while fighting the almost instinctual response to pull the nose up to climb. At this point,

pulling up won’t help you. You’ve already seen why. You must actually go against your natural

inclination and push forward slightly (or decrease the back pressure applied to the joystick) to

reduce the angle of attack to less than its critical value. Simultaneously adding power also helps

assist in the stall recovery. Then, and only then, will the airplane recover from a stall, at which point

you can select a nose-up pitch attitude and climb.

One of the key things to remember about stalls is, if you sense one coming on (an imminent stall),

you do the things necessary to prevent a full stall from occurring. This is just common sense. In other

words, if you hear the stall horn (which typically activates 5 to 7 knots above a stall) you immediately

apply stall recovery procedures.

If you understand this point, you understand the most important thing about stalls. But, whoa, Lone

Ranger! One more thing to do before I take you into the traffic pattern to practice takeoffs and

landings. Stalling at higher than normal speeds is something you want to avoid. That’s why we’ll

practice steep turns in our next tutorial. These turns show us how the airplane handles (or how it

doesn’t) in steep banks or when applying a lot of back pressure on the joystick.

One additional note: stalls are serious things for pilots.

There’s a lot more to them than can be shown on a simulator. If

and when you decide to take flight training in an actual

airplane, your instructor will cover all the intricacies we can’t

even begin to cover here.