Saw Your Life Flash Before Your Eyes?

[Beowolf]

I didn't have an experience like yours but I would say the first time I stalled a light plane. Not too dangerous given the fact I was with an instructor at 5000 ASL (probably around 4980 AGL,) but still. One moment, it seems like your straight up with a stall horn going of n your ear, with your airspeed around 40 knots (one knot equals one nautical mile per hour or 1.15 statue miles per hour.) The next, you seem to be straight down with your airspeed shooting past 90 kt (and I was flying a slow Cessna 152. Oh, and Vne, never exceed speed, is 109 kt.)

Heck, I used to practice stalls just for fun! Slow-flight, too. I liked flying backwards on windy days. Oh, and maneuvers that caused brief negative Gs!

I never did intentional spins without an instructor, but anything else was fair game.

If your flaps were fully extended in that 152, I doubt you could passed VNE even in a vertical dive. Good flaps on that plane. They screwed me up on my private pilot test, in fact. When he pulled the throttle to simulate an engine failure, I extended the flaps too early. All that drag made my descent too steep, and the flap motor is really slow so by the time they'd retracted again I couldn't recover and failed my test. Next time, and every time since then, I used slips instead of flaps to manage my descent.

/and honestly, yeah it took some time to get comfortable with stalls. I do indeed remember being scared half to death the first time.

My most scary moment in my life was when I fell into air pocket under ice and fell into Baltic sea

Now that story, OTOH, scares the crap out of me. It's all in what you're used to, I suppose.

Edited May 3, 2014 by Beowolf