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4 Answers

Practicing Stalls while under the hood

Asked by: 5262 views Instrument Rating

While reading about icing it occurred to me that practicing the result of icing -  a stall, while under the hood may be beneficial for the instrument student. 

In practical terms, I was thinking of practicing this as a power off stall, with the instructor reducing power while the student tries to maintain altitude, while under the hood.  The resulting stall could be recovered from by reducing angle of attack and increasing power.  The objective would be to recover with the least loss of altitude.

Do any other instructors training like this?  Is this a good idea?

Thanks,

Brian

 

 

 

 

 

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4 Answers



  1. Mark Kolber on Dec 29, 2013

    Although not a PTS task, I include both departure and approach to landing stalls in training and IPCs. So do most of the instructors with whom I’ve discussed the topic. We also do steep turns, although it was removed from the PTS some years ago.

    No need for the instructor to handle the throttle. Like visual stalls, there’s no reason for the pilot not to do it him or herself. There’s no real surprise factor since the pilot can hear the change in engine RPM.

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  2. Sam Dawson on Dec 29, 2013

    What Mark wrote. While not part of the PTS I require instrument students to master steep turns, slow flight, power on/off stalls as part of their BI before we even think about approaches. Also ncluded in IPCs.

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  3. Kris Kortokrax on Dec 29, 2013

    Since you mentioned icing, I would suggest that you take a look at what the Instrument Flying Handbook has to say about Tailplane Stalls.

    Recovery procedures for a normal stall (increased airspeed and increased power) would tend to aggravate a Tailplane Stall.

    The IFH states that the tailplane collects ice at a faster rate. This stall would therefore be a more likely result of an encounter with ice.

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  4. Bob Watson on Dec 30, 2013

    Practicing stalls under the hood is always a good thing to do (as is unusual-attitude recovery to help prevent you from entering a stall).

    WRT airframe icing in flight, every plane behaves differently. While recognizing and avoiding the conditions that can cause airframe icing are the first skills to master, understanding how the plane you’ll be flying picks up and handles with ice is also a good thing to know (i.e. ask around to hear about other pilots’ experiences). The challenge to this is that there are so many variables (airframe, load, type of ice formation, options like terrain below and power to climb, just to name a few) that it’s hard to predict what will happen until it’s happening.

    One final point about “recovering with the least altitude loss” and icing is that if your plane has iced up to the point that it can’t hold altitude anymore, you might need to settle for just regaining control of the plane. My rule in ice was to hold altitude until I slowed to Vy and then hold Vy until…well hopefully until things cleared up. The goal being to maintain a comfortable margin of flying speed over the stall speed on the notion that it would better to maintain control than to maintain altitude. But that was in the worst-case scenario (i.e. that I couldn’t avoid the ice). It’s much better to learn how to predict where the ice will be and avoid it than to have that sinking feeling in a cloud that comes with ice accumulation.

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