Lesson Nine: Power and Flap stalls

My ninth flying lesson, was power and flap stalls.

This time I got to make the majority of the radio calls, including the second call of the day which includes quite a lot of information such as where you are heading, the ATIS version, and your QNH amongst a number of other things. Before I knew it we were thundering down the runway which didn’t quite turn out as well as I’d liked with the rotate being slightly slow. Air traffic for the region was reasonably busy.

Once established we climbed and levelled off at 2500 ft until we reached the area in which we would do our stalls. First of all we went over the basic stall from the last lesson, and once the instructor and myself were happy with it we moved onto the power stall. Unlike the basic stall, we use 1500 RPM instead of full idle (about 600 RPM), meaning the nose attitude of the aircraft is higher than that of the basic stall. It also means that the entry to the stall takes longer as the aircraft must slow down considerably. The good thing about stalls is that once you get the hang of it initially, stalls after that become reasonably straight forward and rewarding to do. On my last powered stall of the day the left hand wing stalled before the right one, causing the aircraft to rapidly bank steeply to the left which gave us a bit of a fright. Unfortunately I can’t remember why this occurred.

Following power stalls, we progressed onto the flap stall. This time 20 degrees of flap is selected, with the power being set at full idle. Because the flaps are generating a considerable of additional lift, the nose high attitude has no need to be has high, therefore we stall the aircraft at a nose up attitude only slightly above the horizon. These all went fairly well, so we moved onto the last exercise of the day, the power and flap stall. Once again the same recovery technique was used, of control column forward, full throttle and a little right rudder to prevent yaw. Once the instructor and I were happy with the 3 types of stalls we headed back to the airport, where we joined in a right base.

Next lesson will be intro to circuits.