Windy day. Just under the threshold where it is safe to take off. 500’ off the runway the buffeting starts. We’re banged around like a ping-pong ball in a clothes dryer. I struggle with the controls, trying to anticipate and correct the relentless pounding but with little success. My instructor is calm, looking out for traffic, making a note on his knee-board.
“Watch your altitude,” he says, “don’t bust the airspace.”
2500’ above our aerodrome is Class A airspace. Small aircraft are strictly forbidden. Pop above the limit for even a few seconds and you bring a whole bunch of nasty down on yourself.
The winds were causing us to bounce up and down in 100’ increments. I was trying to keep her level at 2200’ but not having much luck at it. I was nervous. Intellectually I knew that as long as I kept calm and kept flying we were in no real danger. The winds were within the operating parameters of our little Cessna but facts are of little use when the turbulence is causing your body to slam hard against the harnesses.
I made the call to Southend Radar to tell them who we were and what we were up to. I requested Traffic Service so they could keep an eye on us and tell us about other aircraft. Our general handling area over Hanningfield reservoir was a crowded place to play and having extra eyes at Southend is more than a little comforting.
Passing Brentwood the ceiling goes up to 3500’ and I started to climb. At about 2700’ the wind speed increased but it smoothed out. At 3000’ it was eerily calm. I could tell by the drift of the aircraft that the winds were strong but they were consistent. Down to business.
Today was a continuation of stall training. There is a good bit of flight instruction devoted to stall awareness, avoidance and recovery. We practice power-on stalls, power-off stalls, stalls on base leg, stalls with flaps down, stalls with flaps up and combinations of the above.
It would probably be good to pause for a moment and explain to anyone reading this (hello?) who is not a pilot that stalling an aircraft is not like stalling your car. When you stall your car the engine quits and you coast to a stop. If you stall an airplane the lift on your wings vanishes and your nose drops like a drunk falling off a barstool.
If you have the altitude, recovering from a stall is fairly straightforward. If you don’t, say on approach to land, you can end up failing to miss the ground very, very, hard. Even with altitude and experience pilots still fail to recover from stalls and fly their aircraft into the ground (or water).
On this particular day we were going to practice power-on and base-leg stalls. My instructor had me turn into the wind and approach the stall by increasing my angle of attack (pulling back).
Nothing happened.
My airspeed dropped to under the flaps-up stall speed (47kts), my angle of attack was easily 16 degrees, the control column was in my chest and yet, no stall warning, no nose drop, we sat in the air in exactly the same way that rocks don’t.
I looked out the window to my left; under the landing gear strut I could see that we were moving very, very slowly backwards. Cool! The headwind was probably 50kts and pitched up like we were there was no way the aircraft would be able to move forward. We were a big sail being held in place by a single propeller and a wall of wind.
We tried again.
And again.
Same results. As compelling as it was to sit in a fixed-wing aircraft and hover, overheating was a definite possibility so we decided to try base-leg stalls instead.
In a landing pattern, for reasons that are lost to history, the segment before the final approach is called the “base”. On base the pilot configures the aircraft in anticipation of the landing approach, power comes back, speed drops and some flaps are lowered. The idea is to get everything set and ready before turning onto final. It’s that turn where pilots can run into trouble.
Turn too sharply and let your speed drop too much and you’ll find yourself in a world of shit. Not only will you stall, you’ll stall at a high bank angle, close to the ground, with a wafer thin window for recovery. In fact, check that, according to the book most times you have no chance for recovery so it’s easy to see why base-leg stalls kill a lot of pilots.
Although it can seem counterintuitive at first, the higher you are the better your chance of survival when shit gets real. Altitude = life is how someone put it. Losing your engine at 4000’, while pants soiling scary, is likely to have a totally different outcome than if it happens just after take off.
We had more luck with the power-on base-leg stalls. I was able to put the Cessna into a gentle climbing turn and slowly pull back until she stalled. The effect is much more dramatic than with a straight stall: your upper wing seems to whip around and you are pitched sidewise and down at the same time.
Your first instinct is to turn the control column to level the wings but this is a mistake as the ailerons are practically useless at such a slow speed. Pitch down slightly to break the stall, apply power, use opposite rudder to level the wings. Easy peasy.
A Cessna 172 doesn’t want to stall or spin and it practically recovers itself (so I am told). I was watching a YouTube video of this manoeuvre and once the stall developed the pilot took his hands completely off the control column, applied opposite rudder and the plane recovered smoothly. I haven’t tired this myself because the thought of releasing my grip on the controls seems tantamount to suicide but maybe one day I’ll have the confidence to give it a go.