LeSving wrote:
They were falling straight down in a tree
Wow. They should have bought a lottery ticket that day.
I know an instructor who ended up in an incipient spin during MEP training, though in day VMC with a healthy amount of air below. He mistook the nose drop as the stall became developed for recovery action as the student held it in the stall and added power asymmetrically which caused the aircraft to depart.
It recovered after a full turn using standard spin recovery to an impressively nose low attitude, and they used much of the altitude getting it straight and level without over stressing the airframe.
I would guess doing this at night might be a factor in this – recovering from a spin on instruments is a bit tricky if outside the capability of the G1000 attitude indicator.
I once did (during recurrent training) Vmc, unusual attitude and stall exercises at night (not fully dark, so outside horizon still discernible, but I actually did it heads-in on instruments) and I didn’t think of them as problematic… Someone called me brave after I wrote about it, I didn’t think so at the time, but now my attitude is changing… I was assuming that I get things right – but if things go wrong, night might make recovery so difficult that it leads to an accident. Definitely food for thought.
He mistook the nose drop as the stall became developed for recovery action…
To avoid this trap, we teach our students to call “stall” at first indication of a stall and “recovering!” when they begin their recovery. So when the nose drops and the student is silent I know that the aeroplane is doing something on it’s own.
That’s an excellent little SOP to put in my head for the future – thanks.
Assuming these people really were doing what it looks like, that’s just really dumb and dumb. One should never do stall practice etc with “normal” passengers. And at night? Do it on your own, or with some “fully consenting adult pilot”, but not like this. On a normal flight you should fly normally, no funny stuff.
In fact I am not convinced about the value of stalling or should I say potentially stalling a twin in those conditions period. What are you seeking to achieve?
Its a bit like shutting down an engine in IMC – why? You can drill in good VMC with foggels. Indeed isnt that why the approach now, is never to intentionally completely shut an engine down in flight.
It is the same with spinning. If you want to fly aeros spin a lot, if you dont give them a miss.
Peter wrote:
Assuming these people really were doing what it looks like, that’s just really dumb and dumb. One should never do stall practice etc with “normal” passengers. And at night? Do it on your own, or with some “fully consenting adult pilot”, but not like this. On a normal flight you should fly normally, no funny stuff.
But of course it was dumb anyway. If they were really training aggressive stalling at night over a cloud cover – essentially instrument conditions – well…
Airborne_Again wrote:
It was “fully consenting adult pilots”.
I have my doubts about this point. They were students who had a training contract with an FTO. That contract is based upon a training syllabus. No training syllabus for ME training that I have ever seen requires demonstration or actual performance of “accelerated stalls” or “deep stalls”. And even less under conditions without visual clues that would help to recognize the condition and permit a speedy recovery into the normal flight envelope. I strongly doubt that those two students would have been “consenting” if their instructor would have informed them that they were about to perform a mindless and useless stunt that serves no other purpose than to potentially ruin their future lives. In my part of the world – if it can be proven that the guy performed the accident manoeuvre on purpose – he would get not less than five years for that.
Come to think of it, the training standardisation manual for one of my flight schools in LA specifically mentioned stall training wasn’t allowed with passengers on the back seat (whether flight students or not)… – perhaps overly cautious, but I see the point. Checkrides were excluded (sometimes the FAA had a guy in the back), but those aren’t training flights.
