Slow Flight: Yes, You Need To Learn It

You have to hand it to the FAA. This is a government agency that's gifted in its ability to tweak the rules in a way that makes we, the regulated, twist, dance, squirm and shimmy in the most creative ways. The latest example came last week when the FAA revised its standards for teaching that most mundane of tasks: slow flight.

As the story reveals, the agency now wants students to demonstrate slow flight by reducing airspeed to a point 5 to 10 knots above stall speed or just above the stall-warning threshold; in other words, the horn or light, if there is one. In days of yore, private pilots had to demonstrate, as described in the FAA's own dry-as-dust Airplane Flying Handbook, slow flight to a point 3 to 5 knots above stall indications. Usually, that meant the horn was blaring away, but the horn was screeching about an impending stall, not an actual stall. Real stall indications are the onset of buffet or loss of control effectiveness or a full-on stall. (There's no mistaking that.)

The agency is amending the new AFH to reflect this and new Airman Certification Standards issued in June already has been amended. So what's wrong with this change? Plenty. First of all, it will sow confusion among the instructional community, which is accustomed to training students to fly slow with the horn sounding and to maintain sufficient focus to do that successfully.

Well, that's easy enough to sort out. But the larger issue, in my view, is that we're likely to be training new pilots in a way that makes them numb to flying an airplane in all speed regimes. Stalls and spins are still a leading cause of GA fatalities and although such maneuvering accidents are trending downward, they still happen with depressing frequency. Why is this? Blame the airplanes if you want, but the overarching reason is still the pilot. Training may be at fault, but pilots continue to lack the ability to understand, identify and either avoid or correct a stall condition.

Does dumbing it down to now avoid even nibbling at the minimum controllable airspeed make it worse? You tell me. My view is that slow flight of itself has a value because a well-flown short-field landing will require these skills and if you want the best performance, you'll learn that such approaches can often be flown slower than the POH recommendation. You don't develop that skill by refusing to explore the slow-speed regime. Pretend it's not there and it won't be when you need it.

There's a balance here. I'm sure every instructor I know has students—sometimes quite a few—who are terrified of slow flight and hate stalls. I get that. So we jolly them along, forcing them to swallow enough of the cod liver oil to wobble through the checkride. Then they go out into the world and because they're terrified of stalls, they fixate on airspeed to the point that they fly approaches 15 knots too fast and lose control on the runway. Or they're so anesthetized to what a stall feels like that they occupy the bottom of a smoking crater without realizing what happened. But if we force this skill upon reluctant students, do we drive them away?

For a reality check, I passed this notion by Rich Stowell, a many-times master instructor with an expertise in stall and spin training. He told me he had pointed out to the FAA that a stall awareness study done in 1975 revealed that "the most effective additional training was slow flight with realistic distractions … and that extra stall and slow flight training was effective in preventing unintentional spins." The distraction? No, not Captain Ross lighting matches under the student's nose, but the damn stall horn.

If this new doctrine sticks, it puts an instructor in a conundrum, because now, to avoid instructional malpractice, they have to teach it both ways. The Law of Primacy suggests teaching the FAA way first, so the student can parrot the company line on the ride. The Law of Survival argues to teach the student in intimate detail about minimum controllable airspeed, with turns, descents and climbs, with the horn blaring away. They'll thus be better equipped to navigate the real world of general aviation flying.

And no, AoA indicators won't fix this. But they could play a helpful role.

The foregoing is opinion and commentary based on disclosed facts.AVwebwelcomes other points of view, including guest blogs.