Ultimate Issue: Analyzing a Fatal Final Turn

Van's RV-4 accident presents a tragic case study of the stall-spin scenario.

Friday, July 19, 2024 at 08:56 AM ET

Verified

There’s a reason students are taught to establish 1.3 Vs on the downwind leg, begin the descent abeam of the threshold, and maintain a good speed margin throughout the approach. [iStock]

Key Takeaways:

Despite pilot training shifting from spin recovery to avoidance decades ago, stall-spin accidents, particularly in the traffic pattern, remain a leading and often fatal cause of aviation incidents.
Current stall training is criticized for being unrealistic, failing to adequately prepare pilots for sudden, disorienting real-world stalls and to instill a necessary caution for them.
A fatal accident involving an experienced pilot highlights how factors like poor airspeed management (exceeding critical angle of attack), an unstabilized approach, and challenging environmental conditions at high altitude can combine to cause a deadly stall-spin during a low turn to final.

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In 1949, the Civil Aeronautics Authority (the precursor to the FAA), reacting to the number of training accidents involving spins, removed the spin from the private pilot syllabus. Some pilots who knew how to spin an airplane suspected that anyone who didn’t wasn’t really a pilot.

Cooler heads observed that the majority of unintentional spins occurred in the traffic pattern, particularly on the base-to-final turn, where there was no room to recover even if the pilot knew how to. So knowing how to spin and recover served no purpose, besides its entertainment value—which, to be sure, was considerable.

Peter Garrison

Peter Garrison taught himself to use a slide rule and tin snips, built an airplane in his backyard, and flew it to Japan. He began contributing to FLYING in 1968, and he continues to share his columns, ""Technicalities"" and ""Aftermath,"" with FLYING readers.