IMHO, this discussion about practicing stalls/spins so you can learn how to recover from them is a bit nuts.  The VAST majority of stall/spins occur in the pattern, where there is not enough altitude to recover, no matter how skilled you are.   I believe a big portion of the remainder are related to autopilot stalls.

 

I do think there are two silver bullets that can prevent almost all stalls/spins.

 

First, most all of us have Sorcerer autopilots.  Set the minimum airspeed on the Sorcerer to just under your best glide speed.  For my ES-P, I use 95 knots.  That saves me from the autopilot induced stalls.  It also makes setting best glide in engine out easy – just do a direct to on the Garmin, and the autopilot will turn me in the correct direction, hold altitude until my airspeed bleeds off to 95, then maintain my airspeed at 95 in the descent.  While all this is going on, I can focus on trying to get the engine restarted.

 

Second, buy, install, and calibrate an AOA.  My Advanced AOA did not require me to do a stall to calibrate it.  I followed the directions, and bitching betty starts yelling at me at around 70 knots in the flare, which is exactly the margin that it was designed to have.  She has already saved me once when a distraction got me going a bit slow on a base leg.  She yells, I push.  The only hard part was learning to ignore her when flaring, but that is another discussion that relates to growing up with too many sisters.

 

Let’s stop pretending that our superior pilot skills will always save us.  Even the best of us get distracted and make mistakes.  It is time we all invest in the technology that is already there to save our asses when we do something stupid and stop claiming we are better pilots than everyone else because we fly high performance aircraft.

 

Sorry if this sounded like a rant.

 

Pete

 

From: Jarrett Johnson [mailto:hjjohnson@sasktel.net]

Subject: Re: [LML] Re: stalls

 

“ there is no single silver bullet to answer it”