Stalling the twin

Before the flight today, I did another hour or so of touch drills, but this time I was in the cockpit of one of the twins so I couldn't fiddle with all of the controls.

Today was a little bit of a refresher in the general handling of the twin before starting with slow flight. This involves setting the power/throttle to a specified manifold pressure (MAP) and maintaining the altitude & heading while the speed bleeds off. Because it's a big heavy aircraft relative to the PA-28 and most light single aircraft, it takes noticeably longer to slow down, so you have to be patient. Furthermore, if you pitch up a few degrees in a single while flying, nothing happens, but in the twin with a variable pitch prop and enough excess power, it will climb. First I fly at 120kts which is the speed that the hold and approach will be done at in the IR. Then at 90kts which represents the base leg of a circuit, and then at 80kts which is finals in the circuit.

Then it's onto the scary bit - stalls.

In the clean configuration you are flying along configured as for the cruise and your pull the power back to idle and just keep pulling back on the control as the speed comes off. Once you get back to about 70kts you really have to pull back right into your chest and then more as the stall warner beeeeeeeeeps continuously. The aircraft then starts to judder as you reach the buffet and still you haul back until the nose starts to drop at which point the instructor tells you to recover. You are supposed to put on full power and lower the nose briefly to about level and then as soon as the speed starts to increase, you pitch up to just below where you were and climb away as the speed builds. I struggled with getting the pitch down and then back up again bit right and usually ended up loosing more height than I should have. The whole action of stall recovery only takes a few seconds but it's hard to get right.

The other two stalls are done with gear and flaps down:

• Approach configuration (gear down, 20 degrees of flap, 18/25 on the throttle/props and 20 degrees of bank) as if in a turn onto finals.
• Landing configuration (gear down, full 35 degrees flap, 13/fully fine on the throttle/prop) as if on short finals.

In both of these you might be low to the ground so you cannot afford to lose any height and so must recover yourself at the first sign of stall warner or buffet. The hard thing about these is that you don't lower the nose - completely opposite to the clean stall. You put full power on maintaining your attitude and immediately take away your drag flap in the case of the landing configuration or then roll the wings level once a positive rate of climb is established in the approach configuration. You then continue your climb raising each subsequent stage of flaps. I kept trying to lower the nose when I shouldn't and so losing height when I shouldn't have lost any.

After the trip I didn't feel very happy with things at all for the most part. Didn't feel like I had gotten the stalls properly right before we moved on, and the next time I'll do them will be in revision just before the skills test :-( On the plus side though, I managed to get a better feel for getting the aircraft in trim.