Brian Lloyd provided the Saturday Coffee and Wings seminar on January 11, 2025. This is a transcript of his presentation.
Here's a little bit about me so, you know, I'm not just a neophyte, My dad started teaching me to fly at 14. At 14, I found myself in the left seat of the family Cessna 182, And I've been flying ever since. I have over 13 000 hours. All GA. I'm a recipient of the FAA Wright Brothers Master Pilot award. I have a lot of airplanes in my logbook down here in South Central Texas where I am.
I'm known as the spin guy and also the Mooney guy. An aerobatic instructor down here in the San Antonio area.
What the heck is an upset? An upset is when the airplane does something completely different from what you think you are telling it to do. And notice that emphasis on what you think you're telling it to do. What I found in my training of CFIs and doing flight reviews and so forth is that many or even most Pilots don't fully understand how their airplanes work. And when the stuff hits the fan their natural reactions are actually counter to what is correct. You think you're putting in the correct control inputs and you may actually be putting in control inputs that exacerbate the problem.
What this has done is this has led to the fact that loss of control in flight accidents are the leading cause of problems. So, just for a quick thing here, where do loss of control flight accidents usually occur? So I'm giving you three options here, landing phase takeoff, and client phase or some other phase in flight. So Laura, this would be a time to throw that, uh, that poll up there and see what people think.
Laura: All right, let me pop the poll question up. Um, I'm gonna launch our poll.
When is loss of control in flight most likely to happen, Landing phase take off incline phase or another phase of flight. And while those answers are coming in, our first question is from Edward, who is one who says back in 1969, the FAA required a one and a half spin recovery demonstration by the student while such a maneuver be required again.
Well, obviously that's going to be up to the FAA. But, I'm gonna address that kind of later in the in the thing. But I'm going to tell you this, it's not about the spin. So I will, like I said, I will address that a little later in the thing. Uh I like to do spins. I think spins are good things to learn and recover from.
We don't want to get all the way to the point this year before we try to before we execute our recovery. So that's kind of the point there. So how we doing Laura?
Laura: Well, I ended the poll I'm sharing it. When is loss of control in flight, most likely to happen. 69 of us said landing. 23 percent of us take off and climb and eight percent said another phase of flight
Only 18% of loss of control incidents occur in the landing phase. 29 occur in takeoff and climb phase. 53 occur during maneuvering flight.
Key point to remember, you must be able to maneuver your aircraft to maintain control or regain control if the undesirable happens. So that's the key thing. Maintain control of your airplane. And by the way, you don't learn to do this by staying away from stalls and maneuvering flight. You do actually have to take your airplane out, take it to the edge or even over the edge. And then recover it back again and you need to do that over and over again until you develop the reflexes to do it properly. So let's get into some of that stuff. So I'm going to focus first on upset prevention.
The whole idea is, let's not upset the airplane in the first place. Let's learn how our airplane works and prevent an upset. And after I cover that, we'll get into the recovery side of things.
Okay, I'm gonna make some real bold statements here. I'm gonna ask you to take them on faith. I'm going to try to show you some things that support them, but I just don't have enough time in this presentation to really get into the kind of detail I do in my ground school. But here's the first item. The elevator is not a pitch control. The elevator is an angle of attack control. And I don't have a good video or animation for this so I'm going to take it out of a screen sharing for a moment so I can bring up the camera and show you.
My arm and my hand, the fuselage. My arm is the fuselage, my hand is the horizontal stabilizer and my finger could be elevated. And I know the ideas. Oh yeah, downward Force. The elevator makes the airplane pitch. It actually kind of doesn't because imagine that the flow of air are relative. Wind is horizontal.
I deflect the elevator up. Well what you'll notice is the fuselage in the elevator in the horizontal stabilizer move the angle that the elevator makes to the relative wind decreases, the angle that the horizontal stabilizer increases and what happens is the airplane loops only a little bit.
There's only a small pitch change and then it stops as the elevator achieves a new equilibrium. But over here, we have the wind attached to the view selection. And what we've done is, we've changed the angle, the path of the wing. And it is the lift of the wing that creates the pitching. So now start thinking, in terms of the elevator is an angle of attack control.
All right, here's another one. A turn is any change of direction is not just a change in heading. For instance, if I'm descending. And I changed the level of light. That is a turn. If I'm climbing and I change to level flight. That is a turret loop. All of these things are turns because we are changing the direction of the airplane, the airplane doesn't care what its attitude is. It just does what you tell it to. It's us as human beings who have this level concept. The airplane does not.
So therefore the elevator is the primary flight control in any sort of turn and if we're maneuvering to change the direction of the airplane, we need to make sure, one, we don't exceed the critical angle of attack and, two, we don't exceed the G loading rating of the airplane.
So, what this means is, we need airspeed to maneuver. Speed is better. So, I got another question for you guys.
What do you think the optimal speed for maneuvering the airplane is and we have another cold question for you All right, here's their poll question. Optimum speed for maneuvering is just above stall's feet Vy, Vg or Va.
Laura: Well, I'm sharing our poll with everyone. The optimum speed for maneuvering is just above stall speed 7%. Vy 17% 11% said, Vg and 65% said Va.
Well, I've given you guys a gold star because there's a reason we call it maneuvering speed. It is the best speed for maneuvering.
We're going to be talking about lift and energy here, shortly. And when I address the lift formula, I think it will become clear why. But I want to show you some things first, some things that I developed a couple years back at Oshkosh. And so I went up with another CFI to demonstrate one of the things like that elevator being the primary flight control in the turn and so we did a video to demonstrate.
So there you can see I can roll the airplane all day long with the ailerons. It doesn't make the airplane turn. It isn't until I add additional lift from the wing, by increasing the angle of attack with the elevator, that the airplane begins to accelerate in the direction of lift. And that's what makes the airplane turn. I know someone's going to say, well wait, if I just roll the airplane, it'll start to turn. Well yeah it will because the wing is already generating at least 1G of lift and therefore, yes, it does begin to turn but it is the lift of the wing that's making the airplane turn and we control that lift by changing the angle of attack using the elevator.
Okay, another thing I'm going to do here.
You can stall an airplane or unstall an airplane at any attitude. I know there's a sense that if the nose is up, I'm going to stall. If the nose is down, I can't stall. Well, I'm going to show you that that's not necessarily true. Here we go. So the idea here is I'm going to pull the aircraft Oracle absolutely straight up. You're going to see the airspeed.
I'm going to kick the nose over and then I'm going to pull the stick all the way back. I'm going to stall the airplane while the airplane is going straight down. Now, I'm going to pause this for just a second because I want everybody to pay attention to the stick over here on the left side, okay? I want you to see what my control inputs are, and I want to emphasize something. When you watch this demonstration, you'll notice that I don't put any aileron inputs in, even when the airplane is stalled. I'm using the rudder to maintain directional control. I am not using the aileron. You can also see as the stick moves, four and a half where I'm what I'm doing to control the angle of attack of the airplane.
So the idea here is, I'm going to stall aircraft while the airplane is going straight down. So, you can see straight up nose up, no stall, straight down, nose down stall. All right, and here we go. Here comes the pull and there is my vertical upline, no stall. Look at the air speed. Air speed is almost kicking it over. You are now straight down. And here comes the stall. Look at that airplane. You can see the buffet. You can see the airplane wanted to roll into a spin.
Just put the stick all the way back. The airplane is not going to recover until I reduce the angle of attack with the elevator.
So, there you go.
So, there are a couple of old wives tales I think I have hit.
Now, I'm going to talk about lift and energy because this gets down to the meat of how our airplanes work.
Okay, energy.
We need it to maneuver. And lift is what we use to actually make the airplane maneuver. Power. I mean, energy in the airplane comes from the engine and goes out through drag.
As I increase my speed, more speed, more available, lift, The reason we limited Va because once we hit Va then the G loading becomes the limiting factor and I can't increase my lift anymore. And then my maneuvering ability, begins to go away. So here you go, here's the connection. My energy of speed, kinetic energy and the available lift are directly linked together. So how I control my energy determines how much maneuvering I can do.
Okay, lift enters the airplane via the engine. Hey, you glider pilots out there: It's still an engine but it's the energy that comes from your tow plane’s engine. After that well maybe you're lucky, you get some fun. You get to find some lift.
Energy leaves the airplane with drag.
In the meantime while that energy is in the airplane we can control the distribution of energy between energy of altitude and energy of speed. With the elevator with angle of attack.
Remember the energy of altitude, we can't really do anything. Think of that as a battery, or a bank, or a storage for energy. When we want to maneuver our airplane, we must confer that into energy of speed Which gives us the ability to maneuver.
So you know one of the questions that comes up a lot that people ask is, does power control altitude or just power control air speed? The answer is well it does both or yes. If I want to use power to control airspeed and the speed is increasing. Well obviously the lift would increase if I don't decrease the angle of attack at the same time. So if I add power and I don't want to climb and I want that power to go into energy speed, I have to continually reduce the angle of attack by pushing forward on the stick or yoke and retrimming the airplane. If however, I leave the angle of attack the same and add power as the airplane begins to speed up, the lift increases in the airplane, transitions into a climb. So, therefore, depending on what you do, with the elevator power can either control air speed or power can control altitude.
So, let's talk about lift a little bit here.
We can't really measure lift and we don't, I don't have a meter in my airplane that says, you know, how many pounds are kilograms of lift? My wing is producing, but what I do have is I do have acceleration or G-Force. So you can tell how much lift the wing is making. How much do you feel?
So you pull back to increase the angle of attack, you feel that as an increase in G. So, you know, you're making more lift because the airplane has more acceleration. If you push forward on the yoke or stick, you decrease the Gs we feel. That's how we perceive the decrease in lift.
Now here's what if we pull the stick and yoke back far enough, we will exceed the critical angle of attack. Hey, you do that – It doesn't matter what speed you're at – you will make the airplane stall. As you saw in my demonstration, you can stall the airplane at any airspeed, there is no fixed stall speed. That also means that you can reduce the angle of attack below, the critical angle of attack and the airplane will not stall at any air speed.
We have an angle attack Cube. And that angle of attack cue is the stall warning horn. Now, one of the things the FAA has asked us CFIs to teach is whenever you hear the stall warning, reduce your angle of attack. Push forward.
Unfortunately, if you need maximum performance from your airplane, you need to get very close to critical angle of attack because that is the angle of attack that produces the greatest amount of lift and the greatest amount of maneuvering capability. So I teach my students when they need to maneuver, pull all the way to stall warning and hold it there. The stall warning is your notifier that you're approaching critical angle of attack.
Okay, so let's look a little bit. This is the Vn diagram for my airplane, the one that I use for teaching. There's a Vn diagram or Vg diagram , depends on who you're talking to as to which term is used, for every airplane. You can go out and find the Vg diagram for a Cessna 172, or a Beechcraft Bonanza, or a Cirrus. Every airplane manufacturer, generates one as a result of flight testing your airplane. So this tells you what your airplane is going to do and where it can do it.
This line here. It's the stall one. If you're on this side, your airplane is stalling. If you're on this large side the airplane is stalled likewise down here for negative G's. This line back here is Vne These points here, where it flattens out. Those points are Va. Of course, it shows stall speed. The reason I have two different lines here is they are for two different gross, weights of my airplane.
For utility category is 4.4 G’s. And this is telling you that my airplane at Max gross weight will stall at 56 knots in aerobatic form where I can pull six G’s and I'm limited to 1100 kilograms or about 2400 pounds,, my Va is 174 knots. One of the nice things about this airplane is I can go out and we can do a lot of maneuvering and not worry about damaging the airplane. Let me talk a little bit about this part down here. Here's my stall speeds indicated and how you find the stall speed is just look right across here at the 1G line where the 1G line intercepts the stall line that's going to be your stall speed at 1G or that is the slowest.
That green bubble is what I call a comfort zone. This is where most of us fly our airplanes all the time. We might go out and do a commercial steep turn 60° bank and pull maybe two G's. We might get a little bit light in the seat and get down to half a G. We probably stay pretty far away from the one stalls feel, and we probably don't get much above our our cruise speed. So this is the comfort zone. We need to learn to operate outside of our comfort zone. And you need to do that in your airplane or in an airplane similar in your airplane. So you know what your airplane is going to do when you get out here on the edges of the envelope.
Couple of useful things to remember here.
I don't know who said this, but I use this a lot probability of survival was proportional to angle arrival. What this says is, if you can get your airplane parallel to the surface of the Earth before you hit the surface of the Earth, you're probably going to be OK even if you're going to crash.
If you can get your airplane parallel to the surface of the Earth, you're probably going to survive. On the other hand, if for some reason your airplane is 90 degrees to the surface of your probability of survival is not going to be real good.
Now quoting the best pilot ever in my opinion, Bob Hoover. If you're faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible and notice that I've emphasized the word fly. That means maintain control of your airplane. No matter what, the airplane must be flying; it must not be stalled. You must be aware of your speed and how much you can pull to maneuver the airplane because you may have to maneuver the airplane parallel to the surface of the Earth so that your probability of survival is very high.
So remember, the superior pilot will use her superior knowledge to avoid having to use her superior skill.
It's all about the minimum energy needed to maneuver. So let's look at that. I'm going to look at the takeoff and landing scenarios. Well, first, the thing to take away here is the fact that we have no useful energy of altitude to convert into energy of speed, And we have very little of energy of speed to start with. So we don't have any margins. If for instance, you take off, you're climbing to, you've done a maximum performance takeoff, you've rotated, you're climbing at Vx, you're passing 50 ft, and the engine fails. What do you need to do? Startle response and freezing up is not the right answer. You need to push over right away. You need to preserve what little energy of speed you have. You don't have any energy of altitude to convert into speed. So therefore, you must be very aggressive at getting that nose down to preserve the energy of speed, so you can get your airplane parallel to the surface of the Earth. Now, let's look at the landing phase. First off. You have some energy of altitude that you can convert into speed, so therefore you have some margin. You also have more energy at speed, you're at Vref or 1.3 via zero or even perhaps faster than that. This means you have more ability to maneuver.
So therefore, you are less likely to stall the airplane and lose control. So this is why I think there's such a big difference between take off and go around accidents, loss of control accidents and landing accidents. All about the energy thing. By the way, the airplane flying handbook the latest addition has a new chapter on energy, and I think it's great that they included it. I think it's a little too college level. I think that my point of energy, those my points of energy of speed being controlled by angle of attack using the lift formula. That helps a lot more. Okay. So what are some of the things that you as a non-aerobatic pilot can do? To practice some of these things so that bad things don't happen to you.
Well, one of the things that I do with my students a lot and that I teach my CFI students is what I call the pushover maneuver. It's where we simulate an engine. Failure on takeoff. At altitude, we put the airplane into a climb at Vx. I then failed the engine. And my student is required to get the nose down quickly and then get the nose level before the airplane stalls to simulate getting the airplane level before hitting the Earth.
You can't freeze. And it does take them a few iterations of this before they finally get it because you're really looking for the exact behavior for your airplane. And it is something you need to practice over and over again. And I encourage my students certainly if I have a primary student, I do this almost every flight with them, because this needs to be a reflex; You can't freeze and you can't startle. You just have to do it. If you're carrying on a conversation, your hands and feet need to do the right thing automatically.
There are four stages of learning.
The first stage is unconscious incompetence. You don't know what you don't know. It's where we all start when we're learning any skill. The second stage is conscious incompetence. If you're just hearing this stuff from me for the first time, you are right now in the unconscious incompetence; you may understand it, but you haven't turned it into a skill that you can perform yet.
The third stage is conscious competence. You go out with an instructor who can teach you these things and you do it a couple of times until you can do it while you're thinking about it. But then there's a fourth stage and that fourth stage is unconscious competence. Some people call that reflex. Some people call it muscle memory, but the key point is you've trained yourself so much on this that you do it automatically. That's where you need to get with something like the pushover maneuver. You need to reflexively do the right thing.
So, let's go do some other things. Go out and do stalls and different attitudes and turns to a climbing stall. Do a descending stall. Do accelerated stalls. Even though accelerated stalls are considered to be a commercial maneuver. If you're only a private Pilot or a student pilot you should be doing accelerated stalls. You want to know what it feels like when your airplane stalls at an air speed other than stalls straight ahead. Slow deceleration stalls as the FAA requires us to demonstrate to get our certificates, is a very artificial maneuver. It's not real at all. It's not like it's going to happen to you. I guarantee you if you do something unanticipated, it's probably going to be an accelerated stall. So you want to go out and practice these things.
What we're allowed to stall an airplane as a slip? Won't it turn into a spin? No, not if you recover immediately. As soon as the airplane begins to depart control or do things, you don't expect it to or don't want it to. No, no, of course, reduce the angle of attack right now and that's it. The airplane will go no further. You can actually do stalls in a skid. Um, you can do straight Ahead, slipping stalls, you can do. Slips in a turn, you can do skids in a turn and recover. Once you learn to do that automatically, you're going to be pretty close to lock proof. Okay.
I use a maneuver to help people learn. Not to use the ailerons install with a maneuver called the falling leaf. That's kind of, in fact, when I did that demonstration, where I was way nose down with the stick all the way back. Remember, I told you to watch the stick to see that I wasn't using the aileron. This is exactly what I was doing. I was keeping the airplane from entering the spin by using the rudder. All of that was rudder.
As soon as the airplane started to roll to the left, I was adding right rudder to stop it. Likewise when it rolled to the right, I was adding left rudder and if you watched you notice the stick never moved left or right. And you'll also notice that it recovered as soon as I move the stick forward of neutral and reduce the angle of attack of the airplane. But you can do this too. All of these can be done in a Cessna 150 or 172 a Cherokee, a Cirrus, a Bonanza. All of these are things you can practice to help make yourself block proof. Okay, now I want to talk a little bit and focus a little bit on recovery. What if the bad stuff really does happen?
So, what's the first thing? Unload. Unload means reduce the angle of attack. Probably means push because you're positive G and reduce the G load putting, we want to make sure that the wing isn’t stalled. Which means all of our flight controls are working normally and we can maneuver the airplane
Power. Are we slower? Are we fast? If we're slow, we need to add energy to the airplane. Probably want to push the power up if we're fast.
Roll. You want to get the wings level? If something has happened to make our airplane not be level. We want to get the wings level, but notice I say don't pull. We don't want asymmetric G loading. We don't want to pull and roll at the same time.
One wing in a roll has more lift than the other and that means we can easily exceed the G limit on that wing without perceiving it inside the cockpit. So therefore you can either pull or roll. You don't get to do both at the same time if you want to keep your airplane in one piece. So you roll wings level and after that then you transition to level you pull, or push the nose to the horizon.
And that's why I say transition to level rather than pull. You may need to push the nose down to the horizon as opposed to pull. So therefore it's all about getting the airplane back to level after the wings are level. Then you can push or pull up to the G limit of the airframe to get your airplane back level again.
Now, how much can you pull? That's a good question. If you're close to the ground, you want to pull as hard as you safely can. And that's where I've mentioned the stall warning point, you want to pull right to the stall warning and hold it there. Don't want to pull farther and get into the into the stall buffet, the prestall buffet, but you want to pull all the way to the stall warning. You don't want to go away from it. You want to go to it. This will minimize altitude loss.
I'm gonna tell you a story. Most of loss of control accidents happen because airplane pilots know their airplanes, but sometimes bad stuff external effects can get to you. Seven years ago, I flew around the world in my Mooney 231. I followed Amelia Earhart's route around the equator.
And, uh, that meant I had to deal with a lot of tropical thunderstorms. I was being vectored. I was IMC. And I was being vectored onto the ILS in Myanmar. And everything was fine. There were no known thunderstorms around but I was embedded in a layer
And I'm flying along and my stormscope is blank. But all of a sudden, it gets real dark around me and I look at the stormscope and there's nothing there and I call a Yangon approach. And he goes are you showing any any significant weather? And they said no, there's nothing showing
What I had just done is I had flown into a building thunderstorm that turned into a mature thunderstorm a few seconds later. I got caught in the first downdraft in the shear between the updraft and the downdraft and it rolled my airplane inverted. I was actually at 135° of bank and it left me 30° notes down. So I was IMC and upset
Because I do this training over and over again, I was in stage four of learning. Unconscious competence. Myy hands and feet. Immediately started to do the correct thing to recover. The airplane unload power. I had plenty of power and speed so I didn't need to change my power roll. I began my roll to upright. And then with the attitude indicators showing me my pitch attitude, I was able to get the airplane back to level again,
I was now about 90 degrees to my original course, but the airplane was recovered. A few seconds later, I popped out of the cell into a pocket of clear air. And about that time, my stormscope lit up with lightning and, approach control called me up and said, hey, you're in an area of extreme precipitation. So bad stuff does happen. But if you have trained You can deal with it. If you're interested in my flight around the world, here it is ProjectAmeliaEarhart.org. And I do talk about the things that happen to me on that flight.
So, a couple of things.
You're in stage two. What I'm telling you is, you can't learn this from a webinar.
You need to go out and do it until you reach stage four: unconscious competence.
You can't really learn this very well in the simulator. There are many things you can learn from a simulator, but you can't really feel the things. You're going to feel in a true upset. The simulator works pretty well for transport category airplanes. But for those of you who fly general aviation airplanes, not so much.
And I know there are some schools out there that use the Extra 300 for upset prevention and recovery training, but the Extra 300 is a wonderful airplane. I love flying it. It's like Nirvana, but it is so capable it gives you a false sense of what you can do in an upset. So yeah, learning upset recovery in an Extra 300 is like learning to drive in an open wheel Formula 1 Roadster, a car is so capable that uh, that you will think you can do stuff that you really can't. You really want to be flying in an airplane that's closer to what you fly.
I know I saw in the opening video that Laura showed. I talked about Catherine Cavagnaro and she has a very good school. She uses the Cessna 152 and she has a Bonanza, both of which are fully aerobatic capable, but much closer to the kind of airplanes that you're likely to be flying.
And likewise, it's not about the spin. Spin recovery and upset recovery are different. And if you get to the point where the airplane is spinning and you need your spin recovery, it means you are long past your upset recovery upset, prevention recovery training, the acronym is UPRT. Unload, power, move towards Va roll wings, level without pulling, pull the nose up or push nose down to get your airplane back into level flight.
Spins are wonderful. You should go out and learn spins if you can but that's not what you need to save yourself. If the bad stuff happens, you need U-P-R-T.
Okay, so where do you go for UPRT training? That's kind of a hard one because there aren't that many schools out there that advertise themselves as UPRT training schools, I know of a couple, Catherine Cavagnaro there in Tennessee. I forget the name of her school. She has a good one. I do it down here in San Antonio, South Central Texas area Patty Wagstaff has a school in Florida. Rich Stowell used to do it. I think he may have stopped, but probably the best place you're going to find it is an aerobatic school may or may not have UPRT course, in which case you probably want to call around to some aerobatic flight schools. Best place to find an aerobatics flight school. Is the international aerobatic Club IAC at iac.org, go to ic.org aerobatic-flight.school Dash schools and you can find a list of aerobatic schools, call them up, find out if they give Upset prevention, recovery training, find out what kind of airplane they use, and maybe you can find someone who's close to you.
If you can't, you can always come to me. I'm down here in the San Antonio area, Brian Lloyd. My operation’s called Lloyd Aviation and there's my phone number 210-620-0011. Here's the website.
QUESTIONS
Laura: Barry's wondering. Where can you find Vn diagrams for the specific model of aircraft that you're flying.
That's a really good question. I'll tell you. Um, I just did one for another thing that I wrote and I just happened to go around looking for Vn diagram c172. The part should be part of every POH but for a lot of GA airplanes, it's not Um, So it's just and it's not in the type certificate either where it also should be. So best I can say is, maybe call the aircraft manufacturer or search around on the on the internet. And that's what I did. And I actually found what I was looking for, in that case.
Laura: Lewis is wondering about reserve lift indicators are they more indicative of available AOA changes or more than just an AOA indicator.
Not as useful as I think I would like it to be but yeah, you're right. It does have that information there. Just not in in as as a complete a form as I'd like,
Laura: William said he's heard that doing a skid stalll can lead to an unrecoverable flat spin. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, if you, if you do a skidding stall, it means that you're giving the airplane command to enter a spin. Okay? And therefore, but you have time. There are really three stages to the spin. I know people talk about two stages but there's an initial stage that I call postal gyration and that's where the airplane is going from kind of typically a nose level, nose up or initial part of the stall, to where it gets into that nose down, and begins to rotate. And up until that point UPRT is the correct action.
The instant the airplane as you go into a skidding turn and this is where this the base to final stall speed happens. It happens typically because the pilot overshoots remembers that their instructor said never exceed 30 degrees of angle angle of bank in the in the pattern and steps on the rudder to slew the nose around the nose drops. They pull back. They just commanded the airplane into a spin. Ouur plane obliges. It begins to roll over and drop, drop its nose. The pilot is startled. They wait, the airplane drops its nose further, begins to rotate about the roll -axis and now your spin is begun.
If at that point the pilot were to execute UPRT unload and power because you're probably slow, you need to be putting energy in, roll wings, level, and then pull the nose back to level it's never going to be an issue. So, the key thing there is, what do you do immediately? Now, if you hold your airplane with spin entry controls. In other words, rudder into the rotation elevator, to increase the angle of attack beyond critical and you hold and leave the power on the airplane will very likely eventually enter a flat spin, and most GA, many GA, airplanes are not recoverable from that.
Part 23 requirements, for certification, do not require an airplane to demonstrate spin recovery from anything more than a one turn spin. And that barely gets you into the beginnings of the spin. Uh, airplanes like a Mooney with a long high aspect ratio Wing and a relatively short coupled fuselage with a small Rudder, a small elevator. They just don't have the, uh, the control authority to overcome the spin.
So therefore the instant the airplane begins to leave controlled flight, UPRT! Unload power, roll wings, level transition to level, UPRT. By the way, it works in everything, it works for a low speeds stall scenario. You do a power on stall. And uh, you know, the airplane begins to roll to the left because of torque and P factor. You're gonna find that UPRT recovers from that, just fine.
But what most people don't realize is, it works for a high speed upset like a graveyard spiral. If you get into a steep spiral that's tightening up and threatening to cause your airplane to come apart, So look what happens? First, you unload? Well first thing that happens is that reduces the G loading on the airframe and it stops the turn of the spiral. Now you're probably very high angle of bank, descending steeply, but the airplane’s no longer in a spiral power, but we're already fast. We need to be slowing down. So you reduce your power, we roll wings level without pulling. We don't want to increase the G, loading, and break the airplane. Now once the wings are leveled, we can then begin that pull to get the airplane transition back to level.
So UPRTt works for a low speed stalling, type upset and it works for a high speed upset.
Laura: Couple people are wondering how UPRT applies to multi-engine Andre said he was taught to roll before power in case of asymmetric thrust for any reason.
If you pull the power back on the good engine at that moment, you no longer have asymmetric thrust. And basically, you're flying an unpowered, single-engine airplane, and UPRT works just fine. So that's what happens if you are let's say what I call the dead zone.
Uh, right after takeoff, you've rotated, you're beginning to climb, you're below, you're below Vys. And the engine quit. That's why they tell you pull the power back on the good engine, then land straight ahead because that prevents you from losing control of the airplane. You're now flying a single-engine airplane that the engines quit on. If you've accelerated, you've got some altitude under you, and you have reached a speed where you can, you have enough power on one engine to maintain. Vysc, then you can continue. I know that I used to own a Piper Aztec and my takeoff call out included, 100 we could go on one. Oh, that meant, I had 100 feet of altitude. I had 100 miles per hour and therefore I had reached the point where I was going to be able to continue on one engine if I hadn't made that call out and the engine and a single. And one of my engines quit I had to pull power back on the other engine and land straight ahead. So yes it applies to to twins as well.
Laura: Samantha's wondering if you recommend teaching falling leaves stalls and spin awareness to pre-solo private students or wait until after their first solo
Oh I teach it as part of my stall training. One interesting thing is I like to look at military training military training is more comprehensive than our civilian training and I find it interesting that the military requires their primary students to complete both the aerobatic and the upset stages of their training before they're allowed to go solo on the aircraft
