Lesson 4

Today's weather is beautiful (Sunday). Clear skies, high of 56-degrees Fahrenheit, calm wind from the north/northwest. Monarch is super busy because everyone and their grandmother wants to go flying. I show up early and before my ride has come back from the previous lesson, so I hang out in the pilot store looking at the books.

I'm both excited and anxious about today's lesson because I know we're going to cover stalls.

I have experienced a stall in a small plane before. For my last birthday my wife and her sister bought me a ride in a Stearman Biplane at Addison's Cavanaugh Air Museum (http://www.cavanaughflightmuseum.com/CFMMain.html) and during that ride the pilot did two stalls, some lazy eights and a chandelle. But I was along for the ride and not at the controls.

The plane arrives and I get checked out and start the preflight. There are three other planes getting preflighted at the same time. Plus one is leaving just as I walk out there. I have to call the fuel truck because the tanks are half full (or half empty? =;-0) and C arrives after I've finished everything but sumping the tanks. We talk while we wait for the truck. He asks me how it went with M. I didn't tell him about how rattled I was during the whole thing but I do tell him about the crosswind touch-and-goes. He says not to worry because we won't be doing any landings today ... well, ok, just one.

The truck arrives and we get fueled. The engine start goes much better than the day before, though I push in the mixture too early. I just can't quite the timing of it right! My new headset works great and so I call ground control and request to taxi. I then move us out to the runup area of runway 33. The runup goes OK and I request clearence for takeoff. We get it and I move us out on the runway and we take off. After we pass through 1100' MSL I make a small turn to the right so we're heading due North at 2000'.

Since there's so much traffic out there we spend quite a bit of time clearing the area once we get to the practice area. Then C asks me to show him slow flight. So I pull back power to 1500 RPM and pull the nose up to maintain my altitude (which I actually manage to do!). Then I add in some power to maintain 45 kias ... actually it was more like 48. Then C asks me to make some turns and I do that, using a 10-degree bank. "Ok, that's good". Now comes the fun part.

I do a cruise climb to 3000' and then C takes over and shows me a power off stall. Power back ... nose up ... under 110 kias put in first step of flaps ... in the white arc put in full flaps ... hold speed at 65 kias ... put the nose down like we're landing. "Let's pretend that 2700' is the ground. At 2800' I'll power back to idle and start my flare," C says. Then when flaring he pulls the nose way up and we stall. Nose down, full power, right rudder, but don't let the nose drop too far, try to stay above 2700'. We pick up speed and then start climbing, pull in the flaps one step then wait three seconds and do it again. Then once we're over 65 kias and have positive rate of climb we pull in the last bit of flaps. And we're climbing back to 3000'. "That's it, any questions? Now you do it."

Hmmm this isn't too bad. I can feel the plane buffet just like books say and the nose drops like a rock, just like the books says. This is kinda like riding a roller coaster. So we three or four power off stalls.

Then C says, now let's do a power on stall. We clear the area again and he pulls the power back and slows to 65 kias. Then he both pushes in full power and pushes on the right rudder and we start climbing at this absurd angle until the speed falls off and we stall. Wooooooooooaaaaaaaaahhhhh I think I'm gonna hurl!

It's not the nose drop so much as it is the wing drop that is making my stomach heave.

"The important thing here is to keep the plane coordinated up to and during the stall and don't turn the control wheel. It's a natural reaction when a wing drops but it'll just make it worse. The first thing you will always do is drop the nose. Now you do it."

Well, I'm still a little timid at the controls so when I put in full power and started the climb I wasn't pulling back on the yoke fast enough and so we'd just climb and climb and climb until finally I'd feel the buffet and the nose would drop. The problem is that cold air out there and the fact we're in a Skyhawk which is built to climb. It just doesn't want to stall. So the longer we're in the climb trying to drain off airspeed the more time I have to get the plane uncoordinated which is exactly what I did one time.

I'd feel the buffet and then I'd drop the nose just enough that we'd pull back from the stall and so C would say, "pull the nose up". I think in all we did four or five power on stalls before we had to head back.

For the first time I thought, "Chester, wtf are you doing out here?" But I know that this is really important. I need to master this so that I never put myself in a position where I can unintentionally stall. And I need to master it because I can't be afraid of it. If I'm afraid of it then I'm going to get myself killed some day. So during the debriefing I asked C if we could do more stalls during the next lesson. "Don't worry," he said. "There'll be lots more stalls." !!

He told me that he thinks there are two things that you really must learn inside and out ... stalls and landing. If you've got them mastered then you'll have no problems with everything else. And he mentioned that I won't be working on landings for another three or four lessons, so for now I can just focus on stalls and slow flight.

Good! Now I'm actually looking forward to the next lesson (2 days from now) and doing some more stalls.

This flight: 1.2 hours
Total time: 4.7 hours