Have you experienced an unintentional stall/spin before?

ujocka

ujocka

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ujocka
Just wondering how many of you have experienced an unintentional stall/spin before. What plane were you in and what did you learn from it?


I have only done them intentionally in a C-152 and found them hard to get in to. I know it is much easier in a less stable airplane.
 
ujocka said:
Just wondering how many of you have experienced an unintentional stall/spin before. What plane were you in and what did you learn from it?


I have only done them intentionally in a C-152 and found them hard to get in to. I know it is much easier in a less stable airplane.
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I think so. Or maybe the CFI was just playing around. I know I wasn't doing it intentionally. It was my second flight, I didn't even know what a spin was. C-150
 
I'm not sure if I should answer this ;):cool:

Nauga,
with those who have departed and those who are grapes
 
My CFI did a stall after telling him I have no intention of doing it. Does that count?
 
First passenger I carried after getting my Private. Was showing off to a buddy, and pulled too tight in a turn. Citabria stalled, rolled over onto its back, and started spinning. Fortunately plenty of altitude to recover.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Happened to me while practicing a departure stall with my instructor while working on my Private.

I thought we were pointed straight down - a very different view of the world :hairraise:

Sure made me want to learn how to get out of them in case it ever happened again :)
 
wanttaja said:
First passenger I carried after getting my Private. Was showing off to a buddy, and pulled too tight in a turn. Citabria stalled, rolled over onto its back, and started spinning. Fortunately plenty of altitude to recover.

Ron Wanttaja
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Were you like, " Whuut? Yea, .....no man. That is how we set up for landing. Gotta shake the excess air off the wings."
 
Tried to do a full stall in a PC-12 once in a sim, I’d wager someone who didn’t have proper spin training would have turned out poorly
 
Unit74 said:
wanttaja said:
First passenger I carried after getting my Private. Was showing off to a buddy, and pulled too tight in a turn. Citabria stalled, rolled over onto its back, and started spinning. Fortunately plenty of altitude to recover.
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Were you like, " Whuut? Yea, .....no man. That is how we set up for landing. Gotta shake the excess air off the wings."
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Sadly, it was almost a "hold my beer" moment. My last words were, "Lemme show you how fighters turn really tight....."

A shudder, the world passing upside down across the top of the windshield, then the nose goes down into the spin. My instructor had given me a hour of acro dual about two months earlier, so I broke the spin, pulled like crazy to recover (probably came close to a secondary stall) and still had ~1500 feet or room below. My entire back then erupted in sweat (and nothing else got moist, thank you).

First words spoken after recovery was from my passenger: "That wasn't just a tight turn, was it?"

He's now an instructor and charter pilot out of Boise.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Nope. But lots of intentional spins in Citabrias over the years. And the only unintentional stalls I have experienced are the ones where I began a flare(incorrectly...) and the airplane quit flying, maybe a few feet too high.
 
No, but my instructor had me get into what's probably a pre-incipient phase of one in a 172 by doing a uncoordinated turning departure stall at altitude during my checkride prep hours.

Edit: Forgot to mention that this was intentional in order to teach me spin recovery inputs.
 
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Not even close, even while doing turning stalls while clean, dirty, whatever. This is while flying Cessnas 172 & 182 and light sports Aerotrek A240 and Flight Design CTLS.
 
Accidentally? Nope. As someone else stated... Rounded out a little too high on a few occasions. Closest I've gotten. I try not to whoopsie on purpose.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk
 
I’ve come close a couple of times while I was out doing solo air work preparing for my checkride.

Having proper spin and upset training helped that fear tremendously!
 
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I don't think you can in a 172 or pa28. You can yank the yokes all the way back put in full rudder and they just kinda mush down. Theres one cherokee i can get to spin to the right pretty good sometimes but i'm pretty sure its an airframe issue cause it requires left rudder in a power on stall...
Wish I had access to something that would snap into a spin if people weren't coordinated.

No matter how badly a student has done a stall the most i've every seen happen is the plane will fall to the left and lose 30 degrees heading.
 
falconkidding said:
I don't think you can in a 172 or pa28. You can yank the yokes all the way back put in full rudder and they just kinda mush down.
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Yeah. You remember the time we had trying to get that aerobat to stall. Very docile!
 
In my 40 years as a pilot and 25 years as a CFI, I have witnessed 1 unintentional stall and 2 unintentional spins. All 3 were at low altitude and all 3 were fatal. The 2 spins had really steller fireballs that looked like a war documentary. All of them occurred in HP aircraft, 2 complex. 2 were the result of mishandling a real engine out emergency, 1 was just a hotdog who was unable to recover from a steep turning stall close the ground.

Experienced an unplanned stall or spin? No and nor should I have.
 
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falconkidding said:
I don't think you can in a 172 or pa28. You can yank the yokes all the way back put in full rudder and they just kinda mush down. Theres one cherokee i can get to spin to the right pretty good sometimes but i'm pretty sure its an airframe issue cause it requires left rudder in a power on stall...
Wish I had access to something that would snap into a spin if people weren't coordinated.

No matter how badly a student has done a stall the most i've every seen happen is the plane will fall to the left and lose 30 degrees heading.
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You can certainly spin 172. I’ve practiced it on purpose.
 
A few times in 30 years of flying.

1st time I was still a student. I found stalls to be a bit uneventful, they pretty much did what I expected them to. So I was out trying all kinds of stalls (solo) I finally tried a full flap power on stall and launched the plane up (very nose high). It promptly rolled over into about a 1/2 turn of a spin (looked like I was pointed straight down) I recovered promptly a pulled a couple G’s doing so. Two lessons learned . 1. It recovers a lot quicker, easier, and with less G’s if you pull the power off for the recovery ( I didn’t). 2. C-152’s ( and I later learned most other plans) have more aggressive stall characteristics with full flaps.

2nd time was in my glider I was landing off airport into a field the approach end was a couple hunderd feet higher than my touch down area so turning final I was only a about 200 feet above the ground instead of my normal 400 feet. The glider started to rumble (1-26 rumble) indicating it was near stall. I noted my airspeed was slow and lowered the nose. Moments later as I was evaluating my landing area the 1-26 rumbled again and an airspeed check again indicated I was slow and and pushed forward. I then watch my airspeed closely and noted that to maintain speed I had to watch the airspeed and forceably keep the nose down, If took my attention away from the airspeed for even a little bit I would slow down. This felt exactly like the lean’s when instrument flying where you feel like you are turning, so you start turning unless you force yourself to correct based on the instruments. In this case I felt like I was going fast since I was closer to the ground than normal giving the sensation of speed, causing me to slow down if I didn’t watch the instruments. I have since had a least two other pilots describe experiencing this phenomenon. Lesson learned. I think many stall spin accidents are the result of the false sensation (illusion) of speed and or ground track of the aircraft.

2 other times really weren’t inadvertent for me as I saw them coming, but the students I was flying with did not.
I used to instruct in a particular champ that on two occasions while doing slow flying the wing started to drop, the student tried pick up the wing with aileron and the wing dropped even more . This happened quite slowly in this champ. As the wing continued to drop the student(s) started adding back elevator until they had full opposite aileron and full back elevator as the plane slowly enter a spin. In both cases the student yelled something like “what do I do”, and my response was “push the stick forward”. When they did the ailerons started working and the plane came right out of the spin (No rudder required, but recommended) Lesson learned, you probably won’t recover from a stall spin if you aren’t thinking you could be in a stall spin situation.

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL
 
ujocka said:
Just wondering how many of you have experienced an unintentional stall/spin before. What plane were you in and what did you learn from it?


I have only done them intentionally in a C-152 and found them hard to get in to. I know it is much easier in a less stable airplane.
Click to expand...

What a coincidence. My one experience with an unintentional departure stall was in a very weak engined C-152 on a hot day in Lower Alabama....
 
Yes, in a C150 enroute to my ppl flight test. Fortunately my flight instructor was old school and had shown me how to recover.
 
Not even close.

One student of mine got us into an unintentional spin in a 172 while doing an intentional departure stall, but I'm not sure if that is what is being asked.
 
on my PPL checkride... Didn't actually enter the spin but the little C-152 was not happy with my attempt at a power-on stall. Rolled over... I was lucky to have been one of the few whose instructor had found it necessary to do some spin training. I stopped the rotation immediately and recovered... I glanced over at the examiner who was just smiling at me and said, "wanna try that again?" We did (successfully that time) and I ultimately passed the checkride...
 
The DPE who did my checkride made it clear beforehand, ‘if you spin me, it’s over.’ Even a stall gone awry followed by proper spin recovery would be an automatic fail.
 
Yes. Back when when I was a T-37 instructor. That little plane loved to spin. The first half of the student syllabus was heavy in spin training. But even with all the intentional spinning we did, students always seems to be able to unintentionally try to spin the thing.

The “Tweet” was pretty forgiving most of the time, but it would spin you into the ground if you didn’t recover. When Cessna built it, it was like most other airplanes that they built, where if you just let go of the controls it would eventually come out of the spin on its own. The Air Force didn’t like that. They wanted students to have to recover positively, so Cessna put “spin strakes” on the nose to keep it spinning unless you went through the whole Spin Recovery procedure. Ask any AF UPT student that flew T-37s, and most of them probably still can recite the T-37 spin “boldface” procedure by memory.
 
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falconkidding said:
I don't think you can in a 172 or pa28. You can yank the yokes all the way back put in full rudder and they just kinda mush down.
Click to expand...
Yikes! You can certainly spin a 172. Maybe you're not holding the rudder down. If you let off of the rudder, not even applying opposite rudder, they will come out almost instantly.

I remember sitting around a campfire one night at a fly-in where a guy who flies a Cessna 140 said he was scared to do slips when landing. Another 140 pilot told him the plane was so docile you can put in full aileron and full rudder and you'll be fine. I about fell off of my chair.

Oh, and yes to your question, but not during normal upright flying. I was inverted at the top of a loop once and decided to fight gravity and push the nose up higher. Next thing I know my world was all kinds of confusing! Good thing I was at altitude!
 
falconkidding said:
I don't think you can in a 172 or pa28. You can yank the yokes all the way back put in full rudder and they just kinda mush down. Theres one cherokee i can get to spin to the right pretty good sometimes but i'm pretty sure its an airframe issue cause it requires left rudder in a power on stall...
Wish I had access to something that would snap into a spin if people weren't coordinated.

No matter how badly a student has done a stall the most i've every seen happen is the plane will fall to the left and lose 30 degrees heading.
Click to expand...
I’ve gotten my PA28 to spin, but it takes work. Now unintentionally in a PA28? I don’t think most people can get their head up their arse that far, although people often surprise me in this regard.
 
Ryanb said:
The DPE who did my checkride made it clear beforehand, ‘if you spin me, it’s over.’ Even a stall gone awry followed by proper spin recovery would be an automatic fail.
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Guess everything is subjective at one time or another... My check ride was almost 30 years ago...The DPE explained it to me this way: That I was never not in control of the airplane. If he had been forced to take the controls, I would have failed...
 
I did one incipient when practicing MCA after busting one check ride. Flying along full flaps, nose up, stall horn on solid (as was then done for MCA) and flexed foot against the right rudder briefly (probably either shifting in my seat or just inattention). Right wing dropped (felt like a vertical bank, but was probably not) and I recovered before the nose had gone even 30 degrees. Instructor never touched the controls or said a word until later on the ground. Said I'd really startled him but I clearly had it in hand. It sure startled me!

Edited because I realized letting off the right rudder might have caused this, but it would have been the left wing that dropped and I know (picture of the horizon is LOCKED into my memory) that it was the right wing that dropped. At any rate, I was uncoordinated while flying on the edge of a stall and boom! Got my full, undivided attention RIGHT NOW!
 
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luvflyin said:
I think so. Or maybe the CFI was just playing around. I know I wasn't doing it intentionally. It was my second flight, I didn't even know what a spin was. C-150
Click to expand...

An instructor let me unintentionally stall/spin a 150 my 2nd time up. I didn't know wtf I was doing or what happened as a 1 hour pilot, and scared myself so badly I quit flying for awhile as a result of it.

I wonder how many possible pilots we've lost over the years by hot shot instructors thinking they're having fun.
 
Yep. Had something to do with slow flight in a tight circle, inattention/inexperience, and a stuck flap switch.
 
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