If you had the typical student-pilot training, you likely spent a good bit of time with the airplane hanging on its prop, stall-warner blaring or shining at you, as an instructor coached you through slow flight, the various kinds of stalls and their recovery. Hopefully, you came away from that portion of your training with a firm understanding of what the warning means and how to correct for it.
A stall warning system is something of a last resort: By the time it activates inadvertently, you’ve already ignored several other indications that the airplane is approaching a stall. You’ve allowed the airplane to get too slow, with too high an angle of attack and/or loaded up with additional G forces. Then you’ve ignored the controls getting mushy, as well as perhaps the airplane’s own aerodynamic warnings, like a burble or buffet. Most personal airplanes have some kind of stall warning system, as a final attempt to get our attention. They come in two basic flavors: the vane type or the reed type.
