Extreme Stalls

One of the first few things primary students learn is the stall. More accurately, we learn how to enter them and recover from them, the idea being to avoid them and, when we can’t do that, to survive the event. At first, all these stalls are more or less straight ahead. But as we gain time and experience, our fiendish instructor will introduce other types of stalls, like the cross-controlled variety we might get into when botching a turn from base to final in the pattern. You probably mastered straight-ahead stalls early on—you wouldn’t have gotten very far in your training if you hadn’t—and were trained to avoid the cross-controlled variety by carefully planning and executing your turns when low and slow, like when in the traffic pattern.

Key Takeaways:

• A stall occurs when an aircraft's wing exceeds its critical Angle of Attack (AoA), meaning it can happen at any airspeed, pitch attitude, or configuration, not just at published stall speeds.
• Accelerated stalls are a specific type of stall that occurs when the aircraft is under a load factor greater than one (e.g., during steep turns or aggressive pull-ups), which demands an increased AoA and often results in a more abrupt and violent stall break.
• Pilots must practice smooth control inputs and understand that aggressive maneuvering, particularly at low altitudes, significantly increases the risk of an accelerated stall with insufficient time or altitude for recovery.

Key takeaways sponsored by Aviator Pro | Start Your Training ->

See a mistake? Contact us.