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Peter,
Your statement about transport
pilots not having to practice stalls isn't completely correct. While we
don't normally go into a full stall and don't ever spin, we practice approaches
to stalls regularly during simulator training. During initial training in
a new plane, we do full stals just to see what the plane does. When our
stall warning activates, we follow an established recovery procedure, which is
the same procedure we'd use if we did stall. The whole idea of a stall
warning, driven by AOA (NOT airpseed) is to give us a safety margin to avoid a
full stall. It's been said here and it it's true- flying airspeed alone
WILL NOT guarantee that you won't stall.
Believe it or not, there have been
instances of airliners that have stalled and one famous instance of a high
altitude, hair raising departure in a 727 driven by a TWA pilot named Hoot
Gibson that may have actually gone supersonic in the ensuing dive before he
recovered the plane. If we weren't prepared to deal with these things, I
don't think you or anyone else would be very comfortable flying
commercially.
Skip
Slater
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