Uh-oh!

Earlier this week I had dinner with a business associate.  Knowing my passion for flying, he mentioned to me that he had been taking flying lessons and was really enjoying it.  Note to friends: if you don’t want to spend an entire evening talking about flying, it is best not to bring it up when I’m around.  Flying has truly been one of the great passions of my life and one that I sorely miss.

Midway through my initial training, I had an experience that taught me a lot about myself and has given me confidence that extends into many areas of my life.

One of the fundamentals of early flying lessons is learning how to handle stalls.  Prior to beginning flying lessons, I naively thought a stall had something to do with a loss of power.  I quickly learned that stalls can be done at any power setting.  In fact, the pucker factor increases directly with the throttle setting.  The simplest stall is brought about by simply pulling back on the stick (or yoke) with enough pressure that the aircraft continues to lose airspeed until the wings no longer generate enough lift and the aluminum cylinder you are riding in abruptly shifts from gliding to plummeting earthward.  With full power in, your angle of flight is crazily nose-high just before the stall.  Think of the anticipation on a roller coaster as you chug up a steep ascent, followed almost instantly by freefall – except with full power in, you are accelerating far faster than freefall.  Plus, there is a bit of a transition on the roller coaster.  A stall is quite abrupt.

Flight instructors are a sadistic bunch though, and basic stalls just aren’t enough.  No, you have to practice stalling first with ten degrees of bank and then up to twenty.  Talk about disorienting.  But it gets better, because like anything carving an arc across the sky or ground, the parts towards the inside of the turn are moving slower than parts on the outside.  In flying near stall speeds, this requires copious use of opposing rudder to coerce the inside wing into balance with the outside wing.  Not enough rudder?  An interesting thing happens called a spin.  The inside wing abruptly stalls, but the outside wing happily flies on.  At this point, the plane will begin a very rapid spiral towards the ground and the disorientation for the inexperienced is intense to say the least.

Well, on one of my first solo flights, I decided I should practice a bunch of stalls.  The first ten or so went well, but the last one was a full throttle, twenty degree bank to the left. I got complacent with the rudder and in an instant, things turned to fecal matter.  As the horizon spun crazily around I turned the yoke as hard as I could the opposite direction of the spin, but nothing happened, so I tried full yoke the other way. Zilch.  Unfortunately, this was the moment it occurred to me that I had no idea how to recover from a spin. Now there was a bizarre sound growing louder by the second.  I suddenly realized I still had full power in, and my speed was so high I was starting to sound like a WWII dive bomber.  Ok, throttle to idle!

I was pushing, pulling, twisting flight controls in every combination I could think of but was now falling out of the sky with my airspeed rapidly approaching the red zone where wings start to fall off.  The feeling of panic was intense, but I remember thinking “Ok, I’ve got to figure this out in the next few seconds.”

I actually, calmed myself enough to analyze the situation and realized the rudder might still work.  So I jumped on that thought and held the right  rudder pedal firmly to the floor. I could now feel the spin slowing, yes definitely it was slowing.  Within a few seconds, I was out of the spin and flying level, airspeed bleeding back down towards the green.  A quick check of the altimeter showed I had fallen over a half mile before recovering. Sobering thought: the recommended minimum altitude for this maneuver is 1500 ft above terra firma.  

The point of this story wasn’t just to ramble on about flying as I love to do, but explain the realization I had that day.  The realization was that even in an utterly disoriented, panicked state with only seconds to react, I became intensely focused and was able to think clearly and analyze my situation.  Frankly, I expected less of myself. Not in a bad way really, but in day to day life I am not always a quick thinker, especially when I am disoriented or startled.  My guess is that most humans have the same innate ability, but don’t oft get the opportunity to discover this about themselves.