Taking Mooney for a Spin (poll)

[Pinecone]

OK, but once the aircraft was stalled, what was the pitch?  Hard for me to find what I need in those graphs.

[GeeBee]

At the first stall warning, at 0210:50 the pitch was 8 degrees ANU. 

That warning continued through 0210:45 (almost 1 minute) and the pitch never went below 8 degrees ANU and most the time was between 12 and 16 degrees ANU.

If you know how to attitude instrument fly would you sit there with a pitch between 8 and 16 degrees ANU with "Stall-Stall-Stall" blaring while at FL 300+ and the engine power at 90%+?
 

[A64Pilot]

22 hours ago, DXB said:

Honestly I have zero desire to stall my Mooney except a few feet off the runway when I'm landing. I'm not too uncomfortable demonstrating a power off stall from level-ish attitude, watching the ball and recovering not too long after hearing the horn.  Power on stall? No thanks.  I foolishly did my first BFR after getting my Mooney with a random early 20s CFI with no Mooney experience - when he asked for a power on stall, I flat refused - he then made me land and go back up in a 172 to demonstrate it - big waste of time in my view.

My current Mooney instructor has deep experience in the type and won't do power on stalls during the BFRs.  According to him during my last BFR, "the last two students I had do it got into an incipient spin, and I had to get them out, so now I just demonstrate it."   His "demonstration" was still pretty hair raising for me.

I did once get some spin recovery training in a Decathalon - it was utterly shocking and paralyzing when experiencing a spin for the first time, even though it was super easy to get out of it once I regained some executive function via coaching.  The main thing I learned though was that I don't ever want to experience that in my plane.  

I can tell you that if you do a power on stall in a C-210, it will do it’s best to spin, you can stop it but only by chopping power.

What happens and you know it’s going to be ugly because as your pulling the nose up and the aircraft begins to slow you have to add right rudder of course, well before it stalls you run out of rudder and the ball begins to come out, so when it breaks it tries to get over on its back, pulling power off of course removes all that torque that’s overpowering the rudder, but if you left power on I’m not sure you could recover it. Really surprised me as Cessna’s usually just don’t have any bad habits

The thing just doesn’t have enough rudder.

Almost all tailwheel airplanes usually have large and therefore powerful rudders because the have to to keep the thing straight on landing.

More modern tricycle gear airplanes seem to have much smaller rudders.

‘I believe in the old adage “You can’t give a pilot too much tail”

[cliffy]

11 hours ago, GeeBee said:

I have had, on three occasions, the AF 447 profile introduced into the sim sessions unannounced, un-briefed. On all occasions I simply attitude flew the airplanes. If at cruise as they were, simply put it 2.5 degrees nose up 83% for P&W, about 89% for GE. Fly the airplane. At that attitude and power setting it is not going to stall. Attitude + power equals performance. I've also seen on Boeings during complete electrical failure, experienced Captains who could not fly the airplane on the standby instruments because they could no longer attitude instrument fly an airplane. Again, the problem is not stall recognition, or training in stall recognition, the problem is not being able to attitude instrument fly the airplane. The idea in attitude instrument flying is not to get the airplane in extreme situations to start with. If you do and you cannot attitude instrument fly, no amount of stall training is going to save you.

 

Saw the same many times We called them autopilot cripples (no hand flying skills)

Did the same on night takeoffs going down to DC power only, froze the sim and asked what they had working and what they would fly by. Several knew which engine instruments were working but no one knew what parameters they needed on those instruments to fly. All they ever looked at was EPR  They had no idea of T/O FF, EGT or N2 RPM (not that FF worked in DC mode but as a teaching aid a la Air Florida in Wash DC) Even a decade after that crash not one person knew what the correct FF and EGT was for a normal T/O in the 737. It just amazed me. If you ain't burning the fuel you don't got the go power. Don't care what the EPR says.

If in doubt 2-3 degrees NU and push the knobs up high It will fly and not over speed until you get some time to get away from the ground and to trouble shoot  after T/O. Surprising how many big iron drivers had no idea of this

[Pinecone]

14 hours ago, GeeBee said:

At the first stall warning, at 0210:50 the pitch was 8 degrees ANU. 

That warning continued through 0210:45 (almost 1 minute) and the pitch never went below 8 degrees ANU and most the time was between 12 and 16 degrees ANU.

If you know how to attitude instrument fly would you sit there with a pitch between 8 and 16 degrees ANU with "Stall-Stall-Stall" blaring while at FL 300+ and the engine power at 90%+?
 

That crew did.

My point is, if they had never stalled a swept wing aircraft, the would be wondering why, if they were stalled, the nose did not drop.

[Pinecone]

21 hours ago, cliffy said:

Saw the same many times We called them autopilot cripples (no hand flying skills)

Did the same on night takeoffs going down to DC power only, froze the sim and asked what they had working and what they would fly by. Several knew which engine instruments were working but no one knew what parameters they needed on those instruments to fly. All they ever looked at was EPR  They had no idea of T/O FF, EGT or N2 RPM (not that FF worked in DC mode but as a teaching aid a la Air Florida in Wash DC) Even a decade after that crash not one person knew what the correct FF and EGT was for a normal T/O in the 737. It just amazed me. If you ain't burning the fuel you don't got the go power. Don't care what the EPR says.

If in doubt 2-3 degrees NU and push the knobs up high It will fly and not over speed until you get some time to get away from the ground and to trouble shoot  after T/O. Surprising how many big iron drivers had no idea of this

I never understood in the Air Florida crash why they never pushed the power up.

In the USAF we had 1000 foot check speeds.  If you were at or below that speed at 1000 feet down the runway, something was wrong and you aborted the take off.  A non-event at the fairly low speed you were going.

Similar to the light plane, 70% of take off speed by 50% of the runway gone.

[GeeBee]

They had stalled a swept wing airplane but only in basic Airbus training and only at 10,000'. They mistook the shaking as high speed buffet, rather than a stall. If they had recalled their training properly they would know that a stall warning means only two things. 

The airplane is in alternate law which means:

The AOA and only the AOA detects exceedance of critical AOA which cannot happen with high speed buffet thus it must be a stall.

As the BEA report points out on page 200, the first failure was the failure to control the airplanes attitude (basic attitude instrument flying). After the departure from the normal flight envelope, it required increasing skill in attitude instrument flying to recover. IOW, if you can't keep it straight and level in the first place, likely not going to recover from a stall as well.

The Airbus is the easiest airplane in the world to attitude instrument fly because you have FPV, flight path vector. To keep it straight and level put the pip on the horizon. Done.

[GeeBee]

13 hours ago, cliffy said:

Saw the same many times We called them autopilot cripples (no hand flying skills)

Did the same on night takeoffs going down to DC power only, froze the sim and asked what they had working and what they would fly by. Several knew which engine instruments were working but no one knew what parameters they needed on those instruments to fly. All they ever looked at was EPR  They had no idea of T/O FF, EGT or N2 RPM (not that FF worked in DC mode but as a teaching aid a la Air Florida in Wash DC) Even a decade after that crash not one person knew what the correct FF and EGT was for a normal T/O in the 737. It just amazed me. If you ain't burning the fuel you don't got the go power. Don't care what the EPR says.

If in doubt 2-3 degrees NU and push the knobs up high It will fly and not over speed until you get some time to get away from the ground and to trouble shoot  after T/O. Surprising how many big iron drivers had no idea of this

I never liked EPR as a power indicator. Sure it allows very accurate thrust settings, but the sensors are so easily compromised. I think the test cell engineers put one over on management at P&W. I agree, what is it turning and what is it burning are the best indication of thrust.

As to AF90, like AF447 the stall warning activated, yet the crew took no action to abate it. The F/O flew Navy fighters, he had to know what a swept wing stall looked like.

[cliffy]

3 hours ago, Pinecone said:

I never understood in the Air Florida crash why they never pushed the power up.

All they looked at was EPR  nothing else and EPR was lying to them with an iced over P1 tube

They never cross checked it with EGT or FF just as I've seen many do in the sim. They had no idea what EGT or FF was on a normal takeoff. The airlines I worked for never taught that (3)

To take it further- when I got checked out in the 727 right seat (never flew one before) they gave me the usual engine fail on approach. I called the fail and the check list and then just pushed the good 2 up to 4500 lbs/hr FF BECAUSE I was holding the normal 3,ooo lbs/hr FF on approach with 3 engines (9000 lbs/hr total FF)  If it took 9000 lbs per hr  to maintain it would be 9000 lbs whether it was 2 or 3 engines.  It works perfectly in this instance.  If you ain't burning the fuel - you don't got the power!

When we landed and stopped the check airman asked how I knew just what power to go to on the other 2 engines  when the engine failed  because normally everyone hunts around trying to get the power set. He was surprised with my answer and this was with a major air carrier at the time!

Just as an aside - there was a Continental crash in Colorado many decades ago of a 737 that just rolled over and died with no conclusion as to why. I may have the answer but that is for another time. 

 

[Pinecone]

Even so, if you are not climbing and the throttle(s) can be pushed forward, DO IT.

 

[Guest]

11 hours ago, Pinecone said:

I never understood in the Air Florida crash why they never pushed the power up.

In the USAF we had 1000 foot check speeds.  If you were at or above that speed at 1000 feet down the runway, something was wrong and you aborted the take off.  A non-event at the fairly low speed you were going.

Similar to the light plane, 70% of take off speed by 50% of the runway gone.

Is this a typo?  If at 1000’ you were faster than expected, you would reject?  Or was it meant to be under speed at 1000’ for the reject?  I’m confused

[Pinecone]

33 minutes ago, M20Doc said:

Is this a typo?  If at 1000’ you were faster than expected, you would reject?  Or was it meant to be under speed at 1000’ for the reject?  I’m confused

Yes, At or Below you aborted.

MSing while "working"

 

[Will.iam]

Know pitch and power setting AF taught it Boeing did on the 757 767 but Airbus does not except for unreliable airspeed settings. I find that arrogance insulting. Just like in normal law the plane can not stall. Tell that to the acceptance flight crew that had water that got behind the aoa vanes from a washing earlier before the flight and froze the aoa at altitude and when they went to slow the plane for stall check it did in fact stall in normal law and killed them because they were too low in altitude to recover when it happened. Bottom line don’t blindly trust a computer nor believe that it will keep you from stalling as murphy always finds a way to prove how it can.
 
 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

[bradp]

For those that known the AF447 details - was there ever a reference to ground speed made by the pilots?   

[Will.iam]

6 hours ago, bradp said:

For those that known the AF447 details - was there ever a reference to ground speed made by the pilots?   

Watch air disasters on this flight. There is alot of drama fluff but there is also 15 mins of good recorder analogy. One of the big points to bring out is that as the plane stalled no one took it for that. I. E. There were no passengers screaming. The relief crew called the capt from his rest bunk to come up. If it had stalled in an abrupt way you know he would have been running up the the cabin. In fact when he did get into the cabin it took him a few moments to realize what was actually. Happening and by then it was too late, they did not have the alt to recover. Also a very interesting and confusing point was in a deep stall the computer would throw out the data and turn off the stall warning. When they tried to lower the nose it would bring the numbers back into a range the computer would recognize and sound the stall warning horn again. Which confused the crew even more into confirmation bias that the warning was high speed not stall.  

[GeeBee]

On 10/13/2022 at 10:29 PM, Will.iam said:

Know pitch and power setting AF taught it Boeing did on the 757 767 but Airbus does not except for unreliable airspeed settings. I find that arrogance insulting. Just like in normal law the plane can not stall. Tell that to the acceptance flight crew that had water that got behind the aoa vanes from a washing earlier before the flight and froze the aoa at altitude and when they went to slow the plane for stall check it did in fact stall in normal law and killed them because they were too low in altitude to recover when it happened. Bottom line don’t blindly trust a computer nor believe that it will keep you from stalling as murphy always finds a way to prove how it can.
 
 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

Well let's see here. Yeah, water got behind the AOA's because they were not protected during the wash as required by the Airbus MM. Then the crew on the acceptance flight initiated the checks below minimum safe altitude required by the test profile card. They received aural "stall" warning which most definitely means the aircraft was no longer in normal law yet proceeded deeper into low speed maneuvering. What do you think would happen in your Mooney if you stalled it at 1000' then held it there despite the stall warning......nothing good I assure you.

I've done a lot of functional check flights including a full stall series on numerous jet transports and the one thing you do not do is violate the hard deck unless you're Maverick. The hard deck is set to allow time to recovery in the worst event. This crash was caused by plain stupidity. 

I can point equally to the Boeing 757 out of Santo Domingo that had blocked pitot tubes and it crashed too....no computers there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301

[GeeBee]

12 minutes ago, Will.iam said:

Watch air disasters on this flight. There is alot of drama fluff but there is also 15 mins of good recorder analogy. One of the big points to bring out is that as the plane stalled no one took it for that. I. E. There were no passengers screaming. The relief crew called the capt from his rest bunk to come up. If it had stalled in an abrupt way you know he would have been running up the the cabin. In fact when he did get into the cabin it took him a few moments to realize what was actually. Happening and by then it was too late, they did not have the alt to recover. Also a very interesting and confusing point was in a deep stall the computer would throw out the data and turn off the stall warning. When they tried to lower the nose it would bring the numbers back into a range the computer would recognize and sound the stall warning horn again. Which confused the crew even more into confirmation bias that the warning was high speed not stall.  

Do you know below what speed the stall warning ceases?

 

[Will.iam]

7 hours ago, GeeBee said:

Well let's see here. Yeah, water got behind the AOA's because they were not protected during the wash as required by the Airbus MM. Then the crew on the acceptance flight initiated the checks below minimum safe altitude required by the test profile card. They received aural "stall" warning which most definitely means the aircraft was no longer in normal law yet proceeded deeper into low speed maneuvering. What do you think would happen in your Mooney if you stalled it at 1000' then held it there despite the stall warning......nothing good I assure you.

I've done a lot of functional check flights including a full stall series on numerous jet transports and the one thing you do not do is violate the hard deck unless you're Maverick. The hard deck is set to allow time to recovery in the worst event. This crash was caused by plain stupidity. 

I can point equally to the Boeing 757 out of Santo Domingo that had blocked pitot tubes and it crashed too....no computers there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301

Yea but boeing isn’t arrogant enough to say you can’t stall the plane because the computers will not let you. Same as when the computer says retard even when the thrust levers were at idle for over 10 seconds. And in the sim you can glide at idle power from 5000ft and the computer still has to get one retard call in before the landing even though they were “retarded” for over a min already. Only since the boeing Max that is giving more authority to the computer overriding the pilots and taking a dive, this is not something that Airbus hasn’t already experienced and even has the procedure to shut off 2 computers to force the last one into alternate law to keep from having the computer kill you. 

[GeeBee]

It will not stall if in normal law and above 75' agl. Boeing just wants to trim down uncontrollably and not tell you about the system.

As to the retard call, it does not look at the throttle position, it is only a reminder to retard the thrust levers to match the A/T system when the airplane lands. This came out of the problems the MD-11 had. 

[carusoam]

Thanks for sharing the great insight gents!!!!

 Best regards,

-a-

[Will.iam]

8 hours ago, GeeBee said:

Do you know below what speed the stall warning ceases?

 

I don’t remember what they said the speed was but it was a very low forward speed as the profile showed like 400mph down to only like 60mph forward. It was too slow for forward flight to the computer so it regarded it as an error. 
 

[GeeBee]

Yep, stall warning ends at 60 knots. Most airplanes have stall warnings that stop and ridiculously low speeds, just not Airbus.

Here is the thing. Today's airliners are tremendously complex because they are designed to transport people at the lowest cost. In addition there are huge environmental pressures, none of which is within our control. They are ridiculous curiosities of aerodynamics just like the B-2. The Airbus at altitude has a wing/fuselage ratio that was unheard of 40 years ago and it does it with big fan engines running near flame out lean and CG's in the range of 39% MAC plus. All in the search for economic efficiency. We as professionals have a job to fly these things as they were designed, not as we wish they would be. Just like the B-2 when the computers go wrong, they can crash, like the B-2 at Guam. It is incumbent upon the professional to know all the failure modes and be able to operate the airplane within the envelope during failures. 

When I saw my first Airbus and I saw that big red square around all the sensors, I committed to studying what happens when those sensors go wrong. Just as when I first started flying an MU-2 45 years ago, I noted the enormous down force designed into the horizontal stab and noted the importance of pitch control.

I find most problems are the result of training. I don't believe training has been the same since we stopped "building the airplane" orals. It needs to improve, but I can tell you, the airlines are going to embrace fly-by-wire, just as they embraced FMC's. Professionals will have to decide if they want to work these type of machines, or find different work, because it is not going to change. 

[N201MKTurbo]

4 minutes ago, GeeBee said:

Yep, stall warning ends at 60 knots. Most airplanes have stall warnings that stop and ridiculously low speeds, just not Airbus.

Here is the thing. Today's airliners are tremendously complex because they are designed to transport people at the lowest cost. In addition there are huge environmental pressures, none of which is within our control. They are ridiculous curiosities of aerodynamics just like the B-2. The Airbus at altitude has a wing/fuselage ratio that was unheard of 40 years ago and it does it with big fan engines running near flame out lean and CG's in the range of 39% MAC plus. All in the search for economic efficiency. We as professionals have a job to fly these things as they were designed, not as we wish they would be. Just like the B-2 when the computers go wrong, they can crash, like the B-2 at Guam. It is incumbent upon the professional to know all the failure modes and be able to operate the airplane within the envelope during failures. 

When I saw my first Airbus and I saw that big red square around all the sensors, I committed to studying what happens when those sensors go wrong. Just as when I first started flying an MU-2 45 years ago, I noted the enormous down force designed into the horizontal stab and noted the importance of pitch control.

I find most problems are the result of training. I don't believe training has been the same since we stopped "building the airplane" orals. It needs to improve, but I can tell you, the airlines are going to embrace fly-by-wire, just as they embraced FMC's. Professionals will have to decide if they want to work these type of machines, or find different work, because it is not going to change. 

I have about 5 approaches in an A320 sim. Those things are just weird to fly. 

[GeeBee]

1 minute ago, N201MKTurbo said:

I have about 5 approaches in an A320 sim. Those things are just weird to fly. 

Your first mistake is to "fly it". Operate it, don't fly it.

[Will.iam]

24 minutes ago, GeeBee said:

It will not stall if in normal law and above 75' agl. Boeing just wants to trim down uncontrollably and not tell you about the system.

As to the retard call, it does not look at the throttle position, it is only a reminder to retard the thrust levers to match the A/T system when the airplane lands. This came out of the problems the MD-11 had. 

Well the A/T system is already disengaged because the thrust levers are already at idle so again computer not recognizing what position the levers are at.  And the computers were in normal law when they stalled the plane, in an acceptance flight you test all the functions including the computer to stop the deceleration to include going into Alpha floor to override the pilot with the thrust lever at idle. But since the AOA said it was still at the same flying angle as when it started even alpha floor did not engage. A simple code check / verification that at 1 g level flight if the airspeed is decreasing and the AOA is not increasing alert the crew something is not right either the AS is wrong or AOA is wrong but don’t keep going like all is normal. What lulled the crew was all the other checks had passed perfectly as I’m sure countless other checks had done. They had one left to do and they were running out of time so they combined it on the way back to land. Rushing is always bad and made worse by getting away with it most of the time. This time it got them mostly because they were sure the computer was going to correct this in just a few more seconds as it’s so slowww to respond sometimes. I had an A320 on leveling off at 2000ft and turning to intercept final literally get so slow the computer said speed speed speed as the thrust levers were so slow to increase and this was with all the automation on. Airbus needs faster computers to keep up but that would require lots of money to certify so i don’t see that happening.