Originally posted by Evan
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For every single example of a pilot that managed not to stall in an extreme situation, I can bring you one example of one who did.
And you my argue that the difference is in the training of ones and others, to what I will challenge: How do you know?
Stalls are never ever practiced in a real life or death situation where the pilot is invaded by panic and adrenaline which may help him act irrationally. It's a very well known psycho-physiological condition that even the law takes into account if you kill someone while under strong emotional stress, fear, or a state of mental confusion (and you don't need to be a mentally ill person to suffer this acute mental condition under extreme situations).
On the other hand, the 99.99% of the time that a pilot is acting as such and not practicing stalls, he pulls up to increase lift and pushes down to reduce it, so I'd say that it's a quite natural conditioned automated response by a person that is impaired from acting rationally.
Again, I am ALL for stall training, bot theoretical and practical (I have the theory that when the theory is perfectly well understood and incorporated as something obvious, the practice comes more naturally with less need of a rational process). And not only that, I am an advocate of practicing maneuvering at the limit of the stall warning, something that is NOT done anywhere (but in SMRFS del Sur, as you saw in a previous post where I described the program), which I'd argue is more important than recovery from stall and stall proximity.
But I am very conscious that, while that has the potential to increase the chance that a given pilot will not stall on the D day, it is no guarantee.
The best pilot can become basically a rock when under strong emotional stress, and there is no safe way to practice that or to tell who will act how under such condition.
I, for one, dared to go against one of the most basic pilot rules and say that AF and Colgan would have never happened to me. But put me in a situation where I'm trying to extract every bit of performance when chances that I am going to day even if I manage to do it great, and I give no guarantee of how I will react. I hope that I will crash under control and "die like a man" if that's my fate, but I would not be totally surprised if I just freeze or do something totally irrational. I don't know and I don't know how can I know in advance.
If I am ever going to stall a plane, I am much more likely to do it while trying to avoid a car or a tree in the last second rather than when turning base to final (typical GA accident), pulling relentlessly up when ground contact is not of immediate concern (AF, Colgan), or trying to keep the FL with the speed below best climb and diminishing (Pinnacle). In THOSE cases I absolutely blame the pilots (and their instructors).
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