You know you’re in trouble when you go to four different weather forecasters and they all give you different information. For the same location at the same time I had reports of cloud heights from 2500 to 5000 feet, winds between 4 knots south to 17 knots south-southeast. At the same time. The only thing everyone agreed on was a temperature of 6 C.
So I called the airport and got B, the owner’s husband (yes, he’s a pilot, too. He flies Boeing 757’s for a living). “Hey, B, how’s the weather out there?”
“Crummy.”
Hmm. Sucinct.
Well, you don’t really want to hear the details, do you? After another hour of hemming, hawing, consult websites, radar returns, terminal forecasts, and Flight Service I decided to take the chance and go out to Morris. Really, this is the most difficult sort of day, this maybe-we-can-and-maybe-we-can’t. If it’s thunder and lightning and hail the decision is easy - hide under the bed.
I drove out to Morris through intermittant light rain showers. My slot was for later in the day than usual, so I also stopped in Minooka for an Arby’s roast beef sandwhich. By that time I was already running late, so I was driving down I-80 with one hand on the wheel and lunch in the other. As I was approaching the exit to Morris I noticed a small plane flying somewhat low over the freeway. Hey! I know that plane! It’s an orange and white Citabria, good old 8503 - well somebody’s flying this morning!
I pulled into the parking lot. B was there, said hello, here’s the clipboard, no, I haven’t seen J all morning but he’s probably around here somewhere. No doubt. So I started off down the ramp, juggling seat cushions, headset, and clipboard. And here comes J, strolling the opposite way with a coffee cup in hand. Said hello, he told me to go ahead and preflight while he checked the weather one more time.
So I did and he did and you don’t really need to hear all that boring pre-flight stuff again. Important, but boring if you aren’t involved. I mean, do you really want to hear about fanatical me pulling out a flashlight to get the best possible view of a nick in the prop in the shaded hangar, to make sure there wasn’t a crack in the blade? Boring. The plane was wet and inside the engine cowling it was still warm. Yep, someone had been flying in the rain. J showed up about halfway through my preflight, said he thought the weather was flyable, and let’s pull it out. I said I wasn’t done yet. He said that in that case he was going to use the Little Pilot’s Room, which sort of left me wondering if he had just planned to cross his legs and hold it for the next hour or so or what.
By the time J got back I was done, the airplane was out on the ramp, the hangar shut, and I was perched on my seat, waiting. He got in and amongst the usual pleasantries I accused him of having offended my feminine pride the week before. He had failed to notice my new hairstyle.
You must understand - I had very long hair which I had been in the habit of putting into three very long braids while flying to keep it under control and out of the way. I grow it that long because when I cut it I want enough to give to charity and still have long hair for me. Due to one thing and another I had put off getting it cut for some months. Three weeks ago, I was sitting in the Citabria belting up and wondering how the seat belts had got so bound up that they were restricting my head movements. Then I realized it wasn’t the seatbelts - I was sitting on the ends of my braids. OK… time to get the hair cut… So I did. I got more than 18 inches cut off (about half a meter for you metric types).
You’d think the guy who spends hours a week with a great view of the back of my head would notice something like that, wouldn’t you? J, sensing that I was in woman-mode instead of pilot-mode for a minute, immediately said the new hairstyle looked nice though I’m sure he had no clue what the difference was. Apologized/excused himself for being a guy and all that. I told him not to apologize, it was actually reassuring that he wasn’t spending all that time back there looking at the back of my skull when he was supposed to be paying attention to other things, like what I was doing with the machine and other airplanes in our vicinity.
Anyhow, got ready to go, started it up, did all the pre-takeoff stuff. J said we’d do some airwork before going back to landings. Stalls. Specifically power-on stalls. We took off and headed out to the practice area, climbed up to 3000 feet through slightly bumpy air. We had a solid overcast about 4500 to 5000 feet above us, very nicely rippled on the flat bottoms of the clouds so I had expected some roughness to the air. Wasn’t too bad. As we rode up J was pointing out all the local rainshowers and we were both looking at the visibility. Under the clouds it was pretty clear for 10 or 20 miles, although the horizon was obscured. None of the rain looked at all serious, and in fact we passed through a brief shower that we noticed only from a few rain flecks on the windows.
There are several varieties of stalls. The ones considered the tamest are power-off stalls, also known as landing stalls. The engine is at or near idle, you usually aren’t going very fast, and when the stall occurs and the nose drops the motion is usually quite gentle. Often it is a non-event, just a gentle, subtle change. It’s a “landing stall” because when they’re a factor in accidents it’s almost always during the landing phase of flight, and they are often practiced in a manner simulating an approach to landing.
Power-on stalls, also known as departure stalls, are different. As you might guess from the name, the phase of flight they are most likely to turn into accidents take-off. The engine is at full power, the nose is high, and things like engine torque and p-factor are at full. On take-off, these forces are trying to roll the airplane to the left. You counteract them with right rudder. They are pronounced enough that in a maximum performance climbing left turn you need to apply right rudder to keep the airplane on course, which is strange since that normally produces a left turn. This is one area where airplanes differ a great deal from cars - your car always turns right when you turn the wheel to the right. It doesn’t turn right except when it’s in first gear, when it turns to the left unless you turn the wheel right multiple times. Airplanes are sort of like that, though, and it’s why a pilot really does need a good grasp of how things work and what’s going on.
Anyhow, if the engine is at high output and you’re at a high angle of attack the airplane wants to roll left (for North American and some, but not all, European airplanes). The higher the angle of attack the less effective the aerodynamics of your controls and the more free the engine is to rotate the airplane in the opposite direction the prop is going. At maximum flying angle of attack, this is VERY noticable, at least to the pilot pumping the rudders. Exceed that angle of attack and you stall, the nose drops much more abruptly than in a power-off stall, and the left wing wants to dive under the fuselage. They are, as J says, “attention-getters”. The pilot’s job (among other things) is to counteract that roll using nothing but the rudders, and do it so well that the wing drop is not apparent to any passengers sitting in the airplane. Including highly knowledagble and critical passengers sitting immediately behind the pilot-supposedly-in-command.
J changed headings on me twice as he tried to figure out which direction gave us the best view of the horizon for reference and put it off to our left so it would be visible during the exercise. As the nose rose up I had to use progressively more rudder. J was telling me to look out to the horizon, keep oriented, and so on. He also acknowledged that yes, I was moving my feet an acceptable amount (for a change). Yeah, the first couple I whimped out on. It stalled, but I jumped onto the recovery almost immediately. Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarially - if you were low to the ground you wouldn’t want it to fully stall anyhow, you’d lose considerable altitude, perhaps all your remaining altitude, and that could really hurt. But J wanted me to hold it stalled for a bit.
Well, I didn’t do so well at that. I didn’t have enough rudder in, so when the nose dropped so did that left wing, which gave me an excellent view of the ground below. A sideways view of it. There were some very excited noises coming out of me, mostly “J!!!” and yelps. There was noise coming out of J, too - “Use those rudders!” Meanwhile, my throttle hand had left the throttle and grabbed at one of the structural bars in the cockpit because, I guess, I was feeling a need to hold myself up against gravity, which was snatching at me from the side. No, wait, not “snatching”, more like "grabbing with great gorialla arms and pulling hard" Hanging sideways over a several thousand foot drop is also one of those “attention-getters”.
Me: “J! The airplane is going to roll over!”
J: “So?”
J’s terse remark translated: “So what? The airplane can handle it. I don’t care, I like being upside down. If you don’t want to fly inverted YOU do something about it”
That’s when a half dozen things really sank into my thick skull:
- J is a immensely better and more confident pilot than I am
- J is an aerobatic pilot
- I probably have never before had an instructor who really was completely comfortable and confident he could handle a student flipping the airplane over, but -
- I did now.
- J would let me screw up to that degree if he thought that to be the best course for my further education as a pilot.
- I really had better get on those rudders because I didn’t think this situation would look any better upside down.
Now, usually one’s perception of a bank when one is under high stress (and I was) is inaccurate. Usually, it’s not as bad as it looks. But for a moment there it sure looked like we did a knife-edge before it rolled back to the right to nearly as extreme a bank, then centered after a few more sloppy oscillations. And I assume it was me doing all that sloppy stuff, because J is a much better pilot than that.
Well, we got back to more or less straight and level (and upright!). J gave me a few minutes to get my breathing under control. I couldn’t help but notice both my legs were shaking from hip to ankle. Hadn’t quite reached the chattering-teeth stage, although I’m pretty sure some profanity had leaked out.
J is one of those people who is not inclined to shout, and not inclined to long speeches, but who can make it quite clear in just a few quiet words that one’s most recent attempt at something has Caused Disappointment and is Unsatisfactory.
Of course, I had to do it all again. Better. And under more challenging conditions. J and I renegotiated a few things, which would up with me flying with just my feet, hands off the stick entirely. In fact, my hands were wrapped around the bars running down either side of the cockpit, the ones that connect the fuselage to the wings. So, me not having any controls other than rudders, J pulled back the stick and put us into a stall.
Somehow, I felt highly motived to start dancing. I did not want another bunch of rolls like the last ones. Let’s just say that nothing went nearly as wrong as before.
After a couple more stalls J said that was enough, now we’d go back for some landings. Oddly enough, that was almost relaxing after the stall practice.
After landing number two it was another round of airwork. This time, J said we were going to do falling leaf stalls. That’s when you leave the airplane stalled and maintain wings-level with the rudders. And keep it stalled, resulting in the airplane fluttering down much like a falling leaf. I’d done them before, with other instructors. - power-off. This time, J would have me do them power-on.
I got a good grip on the bars.
J pulled back on the stick.
I started kicking. Really, you would have thought I was doing some weird form of martial arts crossed with Irish step-dancing.
For some reason, I felt compelled to say “J, I’m really uncomfortable with this!”
“I can see that.” he said, in an exasperated tone at my stating the obvious. Gee, what do you think tipped him off? The way I was leaving fingerprints in steels struts? The incoherent gibbering?
This was not easy. This was work. At the slow forward speeds in a full stall the rudder isn’t very effective. You have to really jam that thing down. Repeatedly. With force. Quite often with force all the way to the stops.
Airplanes are designed so that in a stall the nose drops, you regain flying speed, and if you have enough altitude the airplane will tend to recover from the stall itself. It will require a lot of altitude, and you’ll often go through a number of oscillations, but it will come out of a stall of its own accord. Eventually.
There I was, prancing away on the only controls I had custody of. I had no control over our pitch, but I did have a good view of the nose bobbing up and down relative to the horizon as the plane tried to recover and J kept forcing it to remain in a stall. I tried to ignore motion along that axis - my job was to keep the wings level to the horizon, and that was taking some effort. At times, when I shoved my foot into the rudder pedal I could feel muscles working all the way up my back to the armpit. But I was doing it - as we continued to lose altitude the wings were not only keeping close to level, they were staying more and more level as I got more practice at the technique.
(I was describing this to someone, the side-to-side rolling motion as well as the simultaneous forward-and-back-up-and-down motion along the pitch axis and her comment was “Wow, you both have cast iron stomachs.” I guess we do. I felt not the least bit nauseous or queasy - the thought never crossed my mind - but in retrospect I could see where that might be a problem for those prone to motion sickness)
Eventually, of course, we started running low on altitude and resumed normal flight. We went back to Morris, where I did another fine landing - J commented that I was definitely getting the hang of those, there was nothing to complain about there, and his only further comments were little nudges to come closer to perfection.
Then we put away the airplane and J said we’d meet back at the office to talk about the day’s flight. His tone wasn’t quite as matter of fact and cheerful as usual.
The essence of the discussion was that while most of what I was doing in the tailwheels was fine (although he did say he’d like to see me in a slightly greater crosswind again), the landings were what they needed to be, and I wasn’t doing bad on the other emergency stuff, but there was A Problem with the stalls. Although I had shown improvement J wasn’t happy with my entire performance and he wasn’t going to put his name in the back of my log book until he was satisfied I was truly safe to fly the airplane.
Can’t fault him for that. In fact, I’ve got a lot of respect for that attitude.
The flight school has high standards - as well they should - and J has high standards. They told me up front what was required. I blew the stall recoveries on my own. Not (quite) to the point of killing anyone - I did, eventually, do the job - but my sloppiness would sure scare the living crap out of a passenger, pilot or non-pilot. I wasn’t reacting fast enough or strongly enough.
Actually, it took me some time to post this, as my pilot’s ego was bruised and wanted nothing more than to crawl off to whimper in a corner somewhere. I used to do stall recoveries better than that - if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have passed the checkride for my license. Somewhen between then and now I got sloppy, lazy, and complacent.
And there are all sorts of possible reasons for that - these past two years my flying has not been as consistent or as frequent as it used to be, since I lost months at a time to taking care of ill family members and also took some significant financial hits along the way. The rent MUST be paid, flying is optional. When the money gets tight, the flying money goes to rent and food and my skills rust quietly on the ground. Then there are plenty of CFI’s who take the “avoid trouble” route and have you do recoveries from incipient stalls instead of the full, deep stalls J was having me do. Problem is, that can lead to a deterioration of the really critical skills for genuine emergencies. And, because I don’t like stalls I too easily find reasons not to practice them. Back when I was flying more regularly, and in the Wings program, the CFI I’d been working with back then knew me well enough to really beat stall practice to death when we went up, but I haven’t flown with that guy for… well, over two years now. I’d been flying plenty since last May, but very little of that had been airwork. And, of course, after years of uneventful flying the complacency monster may have reared its ugly head - I am again approaching a number of hours where accidents peak due to pilot arrogance and assumptions.
It doesn’t really matter how I got into this spot - the flaw must be fixed. That was never even in question. I’m ticked off at myself - I know stalls are a weak point, once upon a time I made the effort to get really good at recovery, and I let that go down the toilet. So now I’m having to fight that battle all over again. The only upside is that, having done this once before, I know what needs to be done and should be able to do it much quicker the second time around.
The downside to the planning? I’m taking the month of February off. Because of certain annual obligations and bills it’s always a tight month for money at the Broomstick household. It’s usually pretty crappy for weather, too, so even when I do have money I seldom fly that month. VERY aggravating this time, because my impulse was to get right back in the airplane, go up, and “redeem” myself. I can’t do that for an entire month. The only upside is that once March rolls around (assuming no further catastrophes in my non-flying life) I should be able to resume regular flying on a consistent basis.
