For the past 10 days, I’ve been flogging the Cub around testing some new action cameras from Garmin and GoPro. Look for the video on that next week. While the Cub is fun to fly, it’s not like you’re going to take one on a trip, unless you’ve got calendar-scale time to burn and an iron butt and back. So it’s natural that Cub flying is fooling-around flying; lots of landings, working on things like steep turns, slips, slow flight and other assorted airwork most pilots who fly faster airplanes don’t really mess with because they’ve got better things to do.

So while the cameras were grinding away collecting pixels for evaluation, I amused myself with a full stall series, just to feel things out a little after nearly four months out of the cockpit recovering from an injury. While I was doing these, it occurred to me that sometime in my flying career, I disabused myself of the notion that stall recovery requires both lowering the nose and jamming in a bunch of power. I don’t do it that way unless there’s some compelling reason for applying all of the Cub’s thundering herd of 75 ponies.

In my experience, that’s generally not how pilots I’ve flown with have been trained or at least how they remember being trained. When I’ve done flight reviews and ask for a stall demo, the reaction is almost universally an abrupt pitch down and a vigorous application of power. What could be—and should be—an elegant, almost subtle thing, is actually a rather coarse handling of controls and throttle that results in more pitch down than is necessary, not to mention power-induced yaw that’s of no help.

I think the reason for this is that the FAA’s stultifying Airplane Flying Handbook, which is the doctrinal bedrock of primary training, describes the importance of power application in the stall recovery, mainly as a means of minimizing altitude loss. This makes sense, especially if you don’t have the altitude to lose if you were, say, at 500 feet in the pattern. Otherwise, it’s just Pavlovian stimulus-response for that single circumstance in which it’s assumed the pilot is too task saturated to analyze the situation and act.

Interestingly, the AFH also explains that stalls can be recovered without power and that this should be taught. And I think it is taught. But I don’t think it gets much emphasis in training because absent any instructions, many pilots will use the cram-in-the-power method as though a power-off recovery hadn’t occurred to them.

But in the Cub—or any airplane where I’m messing with stalls—I almost always use the power off method. Slow the airplane down, idle the engine and smoothly and gently pitch up until the stall announces itself with a post-burble break, if there is one. (The Cub doesn’t have much of a break.) Then gently lower the pitch until unstalled flight is reestablished, rinse, repeat. The fun is to feel for that moment when the wing is happy again, then load up a little and stall it some more. I can do that for 10 minutes without losing enough altitude to need power to recover it. It’s helpful to remind yourself to keep the wings level with rudder, not aileron. And not using the ball, either, but an outside reference for yaw cues for wings-level stalls.

I wouldn’t be so cheeky as to suggest that teaching stalls this way—de-emphasis on power recovery in favor of simply unloading the wing—would make the slightest dent in the stall/spin accident record. And anyway, maybe we’ve gotten about as good as we’re going to get on stall accidents. Maybe we’re into group think in beating this idea that we’re terrible at stall recovery. But I do wonder if it would make some pilots less nervous about stalls and more cognizant of a feel for wing loading, angle of attack and precise control of the airplane if power were more evenly left out of the recovery scenario.

It would require giving up on the lowest common denominator notion that posits that most would-be pilots don’t have the mental bandwidth to analyze whether they need gobs of power as a survival response or they can just, you know, relax the pitch a little. I’ll admit that for some students, this is probably true and expecting a nuanced, situational response from them is futile. I have no idea what the percentage of pilots who are thus overwhelmed actually is. But it’s probably not trivial.

Related to this high-Alpha meandering around the sky is a note David Rogers sent me when we were discussing the FAA’s new doctrine on teaching slow flight. Rogers is a longtime faculty member at the Naval Academy and a nationally recognized aerospace engineering expert. He says it’s worth mentioning that the term “behind the power curve” is something that’s briefed theoretically but it’s not something that’s trained much, if it all. And why would it be?

It’s not inside the normal envelope of operation and the real need for the understanding is probably limited to that rarified slice of pilots stuffing airplanes into short fields or sandbars on a regular basis. And even then, a pilot skilled in such operations shouldn’t have to hang it on the prop to spot land and stop short, although that’s one way of doing it.

But like exploring stalls just for the heck of it, learning about flying behind the power curve—also sometimes known as the region of reversed command—is useful just as a skills and knowledge multiplier. If you’ve experimented with it in the casual realm of fun flying, you might just recognize it if you ever blunder into it in the heat of battle. I’m actually a recognized expert myself in this topic; the Cub is so anemically powered that every climb out is behind the power curve. You kinda get used to it.

About Those Cameras

More instructors are using cameras in the cockpit as just another teaching and learning tool and they’re terrific for that purpose. For a while now, Garmin’s VIRB series cameras have had onboard GPS capable of recording various flight parameters that can be overlaid right on the video.

That’s useful to have for post-flight briefing. The cameras will also record good quality audio from the aircraft audio system so both student and instructor can have an indelible record of the training. You may recall that Icon is installing cameras in cockpits as standard equipment to serve, for all intents and purposes, as a cockpit voice and data recorder.

The latest cameras are impressively capable but there’s a problem: They’ve been that way for several years and GoPro finds itself in financial difficulties because it has been slow to introduce new products and the new product, at least the GoPro Hero 5 I’ve been testing, is not so much better that droves of buyers will rush out to grab it. It’s not like the difference between an iPhone 5 and 6, say. GoPro is a victim of its own success.

This gives Garmin a market opportunity with the new VIRB Ultra 30 because with its sophisticated GPS and altimetry, it does things the GoPro doesn’t and ties nicely into Garmin’s extensive line of fitness and sports products. I won’t be surprised to see Garmin become a bigger player in the action cam segment. I was at the dropzone over the weekend having a skydiver friend test the cameras and several people said, “Hey, I didn’t know Garmin made cameras.” Well, it does. And you may see more of them.