But they are augmented to make them feel stable (or in some cases neutrally stable) to the pilot in normal operating modes. What I'm saying is that an airplane that feels like an unstable airplane (and may be unstable) is not necessarily uncontrollable. Less than desirable, of course, but not necessarily unflyable.
Yet, Wikipedia ascribes that to all stalls, which just is in error. That's an absolute for you.
You're nitpicking over the terms, but Wikipedia is still wrong and the statement that there's a "sudden drop" is wrong either for lift or coefficient of lift. The coefficient of lift vs. AOA is fairly symmetrical as stated (and the plot even shows it gentler on the stalled side). Lift for our purposes is just coefficient of lift times flow speed anyway. I disagree that the lift vs. AOA would be flat, that isn't supported either by physics or practice.
You've said this more than once but I respond again that as a blanket statement this is incorrect. There *may* be a gradual reduction in lift, but in other cases it *may* be an abrupt reduction in CL or lift, pick your metric. Wings with sharp leading edges tend to have more abrupt separation than those with blunt, but then again that is not an absolute either.
We're in violent agreement. Wikipedia does not say MAY, it says WILL. The page is wrong.
Stalls in fixed-wing flight are often experienced as a sudden reduction in lift as the pilot increases the wing's angle of attack and exceeds its critical angle of attack.
+1 for @Dana - Wiki's full statement is accurate. If the lift coefficient goes down as a result of the angle of attack going up, the airfoil is stalled.
Some wings will almost always exhibit a 'sudden loss of lift', some wings won't, others might or might not depending on other entry conditions. Parse that however you like, but it appears that most of us understand the article, even if we don't use it as a definitive source.
Time for a story from the trenches. I was involved with testing an airplane that had a requirement for less than something like 30 deg wing drop at stall. Day after day after day of stall testing with a variety of tiny (and I mean *tiny*) vortex generators, trip strips, fences....45, 60, 90 deg of rolloff. One particularly effective mod resulted in an abrupt 360 deg roll back to wings level and unstalled (i.e. recovered). I'm not sure if they were serious or not, but one of the test team proposed that this was technically a net 0 deg bank angle and therefore a success.
I probably could if I could remember, but it was ~30 years ago. There were so many different combinations of tiny little gizmos to try to tailor separation and moderate the 'sudden loss of lift' on one wing that I can't recall the specifics of any particular test. The final fix was a much more invasive and extensive airframe mod.
What's wrong with just allowing the nose to fall?
I think you answered it mostly yourself.. a typical, stable, GA plane will obey well the airspeed it is trimmed to. So if you are trimmed to 5mph above stall, the plane will fly 5mph above stall. The plane will take a moment or two to react, but if trimmed properly it will fly that trim. The pedants here will say "yeah but the 'obscure-plane-that-there-are-3-examples-of-does-x" but your everyday GA piece of trash plane (172, PA-28, 152) will simply fly the trimmed airspeed you have, hands off. You pull the power, the nose goes down, you add power, the nose comes up. Based on these responses here it makes me think some people have never bothered to trim a plane out in flight, have never stalled a plane (or haven't in decades) or worse, believe trim corresponds to aircraft pitch.. (about 5 posts above mine)
Both these people are idiots. I lost it for flightchops after they blew some planes off the ramp at OSH doing a DC-3 run up in a long line of planes. Dan Gryder is good only for the occasional session of banjo music and masochism
Agreed. It would seem odd and very anti-Cessna to have an aircraft like a C182 with a Vx equal to full flap stall. Of course, you normally don't climb at Vx with flaps hanging out.
I've actually tested it many times in his exact model aircraft. He is incorrect.
