Rainy Weekend Stalls

Well much to my surprise conditions were good enough on Sunday to fly. The pressure had been rising all day, the cloud lifted until we had over 2000ft to play with. This Sunday I was learning slow flight, including standard stall recovery.

I should really have written this up straight away. Damn my shabby memory.

Every manoeuvre seems to have its own work process acronym - this one was no different. HASELL stands for

H - height. Do we have enough for this? 3000ft is the recommendation.
A - aircraft. This is our plane. Is it configured, in trim, straight and level.
S - security. Physical security for passengers, pilot and loose articles.
E - engine. Temperatures and pressures.
L - location. Are we in a suitable place. ABCCCD (Airfields, built up areas, crowd, cloud, controlled airspace, danger areas)
L - lookout. Is the airspace clear and safe. We should include some turns to clear.

On subsequent trys we can reduce this to HELL.

We start with

P - power - 1500 RPM and in balence
A - attitude - > 60kts, 2000 RPM
T - trim

Standard Stall recovery (At Last)

So the aircraft stalls when the angle of attack is around 15˚ - not very steep. This is known as the critical angle. To recover:-

Pitch forward
Apply full power
Balance

I felt okay doing the stall recovery - seemed fairly sensible. However I didn't get to see what happens if one wing drops - one should keep the ailerons straight. Doing otherwise makes things worse - spinny spinny! Stu demonstrated a spin recovery which once again had my stomach in my mouth.

Kemble Information

Well things looked good this weekend when I left home, but as I got closer to Kemble the cloud gathered. When I entered the club house (in their own words) six grown men were gathered looking at the sky. One of them was my instructor Stuart who sadly told me the cloud was too low and too solid to do slow flight and stalls for which we needed plenty of altitude. I hung around for a little while to see what would happen - the weather was right on the edge of clearing up, but I was to have no flying today.

So Stu took me for a tour of Kemble Operations and the Control Tower. Glenn was running things in the tower and it was fascinating to see how things worked from this side. Each aircraft has a card and plastic holder which Glenn was putting in different places on a special rack to indicate where it was - on the runway, taxiing, circuits, flying in the local area or passing through. Things looked quite complicated and he was only looking after six aircraft. One cheery thing though was just how many people got RT stuff wrong - there's hope for me yet. The aviation world was firmly divided into newbies getting RT wrong and sounding nervous and those real old hands who confidently got things wrong or were simply unclear. Stu explained the importance of keeping the messages short and accurate - the tower has a lot of people to deal with and one shouldn't hog air time.

I was happy to see the return of Zulu Whiskey to the club after weeks being away for repair. She'd only arrived the day before and apparently Zoe was seen to do a little dance. Zulu Whiskey has been away for months for service and was waiting for parts from the States. It was also nice to see one of the Piper Cubs I'd seen at Duxford in July at Kemble today. She was refueling while we were in the tower but sadly I missed the takeoff. All of this just serves to fire my enthusiasm and I just want to fly. I'm sitting here with rain lashing against the window yet again this summer.