Good morning,
newcomer question: Since the issue was inter alia raised here I wonder if anyone here with a bit of experience with twitchy road vehicles (motorcycles in the wet/snow, sports cars without electronic assistance systems) could help me understand how “non-benign” stall behaviour (thinking about classic Lancairs, Midget Mustang, etc.) would translate into such a road vehicle’s necessity to be quick to detect that it will spin out.
I have driven for years in most kind of weathers my old motorcycles (Honda Vigor and Moto Guzzi Breva 750 ), and my mostly daily driver is still a 2001 Lotus Elise where the only electronic gizmo apart from the ECU is the car radio, and the car needs very careful handling in the wet (rear-wheel drive with comparatively little weight on the rear axle; grips, grips, grips, twitches quickly, and if you don’t catch it, you’re off into the hedge), so I’m relatively comfortable that I have to deal quickly with these behaviours.
I’ve started practical flying sessions with an instructor and the club’s Robin DR 401-135cdi, and the stall of that plane feels very harmless (like a fat guy sitting down into a couch …), and I wonder if the aforementioned less benignly-stalling behaviour could in any way be compared with handling the vehicles I have experience with.
Cheers,
Sebastian
Edit: fixed links
The difference with cars is that you lose altitude and if close to the ground will crash. Training aircraft are designed to stall in a benign way, but even they can be induced into a spin in certain circumstances. The most vicious is the power-on stall, generally arising after an over steep take-off. At a safe altitude your instructor will teach you how to recover from a stall gracefully, and some instructors will give you some spin recovery training as well, but it is not taught everywhere.
A common place to stall is on the base to final leg when trying to turn too much. Your instructor will teach you how to avoid this as it is vital to safety.
Instructors on this forum will give you better information, but it is your instructor who will teach you.
Simon
OK, of course the plane moves in three dimensions while road vehicles are (mostly) constrained to two dimensions. That I’ll have to deal with the secondary effects of a stall (loss of altitude, etc.) is clear, I was more interested if one can compare the necessity for having good feedback from the vehicle and reacting quickly to incipient unstable conditions between the different kinds of vehicles.
Please don’t take my questions the wrong way, I’m not trying to imply that my experience with road vehicles has anything to do with learning to fly; what I’m after is to find out from the collective experience here how I can make most use of my skills in an adjacent field in the newly-taken up task to learn to fly.
(Bad?) analogy: I never learned to ski as a child, and took it up ten years ago when I was almost thirty. As to the transferrable skills, I went since late teens regularly to Judo practice so falling down was not something to be feared as such (also, knowing how to avoid injuries by using good trained technique helps). So when I taught myself skiing, I was of course slowly starting, and fell down a lot, but I knew not to fear the falling down since that was a well-trained skill of mine. Coming back to the original question, my Judo skills have no bearing on my skiing skills, but having usable skills that can be transferred makes learning something new much more efficient, that’s why I’m inquiring how one would characterise stall behaviour in light of vehicular behaviour and techniques I am familiar with.
Cheers,
Sebastian
A PPL course is designed with safety in mind. The more advanced types of flying are taught in aerobatic/acrobatic training where your skills might come in useful.
Simon
There is one truth for the analogy regarding the physics behind: regime switches that applies to laminar-turbulent transition fluid flow while flying/stalling in air or surfing/sinking in water versus stick-slip transition for solids as well as how to get into and out (same as car: reduce power/relax wheel get you out of the slip the same as aircraft reduce power/relax stick gets you out of stall)
Another lesson, as don’t slip a car that does not want to skid, the same don’t spin something that really struggles to spin, try on something that goes quickly into and out of a spin or just don’t try it (I tried hard to spin a glider that always spiral dive after stall, I was really surprised when it finally spins one turn but to the other way while almost recovered by itself upside-down 
)
But that’s where the analogy stops, the problem as the other mentioned is height and 3D (potential energy and everywhere contact things), in car slip you can stop it by taking power but power off will not get you out of a stall
The analogy to learning to ski (or cycling in bike) while limited is quite good for flying, as lesson is that “speed is king”: you need speed to stay in control altough they have quit different mechanics: bike speed give you stability due to gyro, ski speed give you stability from their 1D shapes
I guess all you can learn from car skid/aircraft stall is that you need to relax and the correct response is the opposite of the intuitive one and from skiing/flying is that you shouldn’t be afraid of moving forward and if you are afraid of heights, go try gliding where “height is king” (not many pilots will admit their fear of heights, but as you see most will tend to fly at 2500ft free of airspace, while 6000ft-8000ft are rather the sweet spot)
I don’t know transferable as such. It’s more like a good driver has good reactions, and good reactions will also benefit a pilot. A good driver also has a “feeling” for how an object react to forces, how it rotates, moves, inertia etc. and that “feeling” will also benefit a a pilot. These things become better with practice I would think, so training your reactions in some way or the other, will benefit everything requiring good reactions. But I think it’s essential to “think” aircraft rather than car or bike if you want to become a pilot.
One of my students is driving diggers. His stick handling is just perfect from the start. None of this abrupt overcompensation and wading around, nor the opposite, using the stick too little, too late. Maybe this is a transferable skill? Or maybe he is also driving diggers because he got some magic stick handling feeling from birth? I don’t know. The pedals work in opposite direction on a digger, so that part has been a bit interesting, but surprisingly uneventful. Another one has been flying model aircraft, he also just got it in him, so we can go more straight to other stuff (pattern training, emergency procedures, etc). Others need much more basic aircraft handling training, on the order of 10x, maybe more. But, I’m instructing microlights, and we have a focus on handling, rather than procedures. You cannot bang a flimsy microlight on the tarmac like you can with a C-172 and hope to get away with it, it would fall apart. Also, all microlights I have flown are more “difficult” than a super stable, slow reacting C-172 where you got all the time in the world, so good handling (stick and rudder feel) is king. Not that procedures are unimportant, it’s more that the importance increases with aircraft complexity, and minimum stall speed, thus comparatively unimportant for microlights.
Other things, more abstract stuff like situational awareness, getting an overall view of the situation around an airfield, or geographical orientation can also be trained by other means I think. To become an ATC (in Norway at least), you have to go through several tests you have to pass: Your ability to think in 3D, concentration, your ability to “get” things fast, your simultan capacity, cooperation skills, communication skills, how much stress you can take + a few other. It turns out that this is the exact same skills needed to be good in online gaming So ATC is just a bunch of gamers
@Sebastian_H, I think a better road going analogy for a plane that departs controlled flight from the stall would be the trailing throttle oversteer of an early Porsche 911. Your stuff, on two and four wheels, is relatively benign and would be more analogous to modern aerobatic aircraft: sporty, direct and sensitive but not ill behaved.
The biggest transferable skill that came along from motorcycling for me was risk management, not so much control skills.
Thanks for the tips and information!
@Silvaire: I had to look up trailing throttle oversteer, and then realised that I was acquainted with the phenomenon as lift-off oversteer. While I concur that my bikes are on the benign end of the spectrum, I’ll gladly let you take the Lotus to a trackday in Zandvoort and revisit your statement of “relative benign” – With the daily-driver tyres mounted, there’s very little warning between having still grip in a corner, and spinning away into the gravel (there’s more, but not much, warning with the proper, softer tyres I had on when I was still living in southern Bavaria and used to drive in the Alps a lot, but which are not needed on the boring flat roads where I live now), which seemed to me to sound at least similar to a “sharp” stalling behaviour.
With the daily-driver tyres mounted, there’s very little warning between having still grip in a corner, and spinning away into the gravel (there’s more, but not much, warning with the proper, softer tyres I had on when I was still living in southern Bavaria and used to drive in the Alps a lot, but which are not needed on the boring flat roads where I live now), which seemed to me to sound at least similar to a “sharp” stalling behaviour.
Maybe, but IMO its not comparable. You have full control of a car when sliding and spinning, like in rally and rallycross. There is no similar “mode” of operation in an aircraft. A spin and a snap roll are controlled maneuvers, and the wing is stalled. But you cannot “stall” your way in an aircraft from Paris to Dacar (or wherever they drive these days). It’s essential to think “aircraft” when flying IMO.
When stalling just about any aircraft when turning to a short final, you are dead. That’s the point. There is no recovery, because there isn’t enough alt to recover, not in any aircraft. It’s essential also to think in 3D.
I think aircraft are generally more like boats in their control characteristics than road vehicles. You shepherd a plane from place to place by pushing on a fluid, without the need or capability for millimeter scale precision. Decisions tend to be on a slower time scale, but harder to reverse once made.
My analogy to an old tail heavy Porsche 911 (or Corvair if you are familiar) is that the departure from control is similar to an inadvertent aircraft spin entry and violent enough that it’s uncontrollable. If on the outside of the road there happens to be a cliff the effects are predictable. None the less, and just like aircraft, good technique avoids the issue.
