Backcountry Pilot • Bank angle

Bank angle

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Bank angle

I was young once and had to consider bank angle every time I turned, especially in tired 65 hp airplanes at high density altitude. I expect I would have gotten very careful about bank angle. But then I went to Slaton Flying Service crop dusting school before we called crop dusting Ag. There I learned that I could turn at any bank angle, even with a full load, so long as I released any back pressure I was holding on the elevator. I also lost my fear, both legal and actual, of being low. Need for altitude no longer owned my muscle memory. That allowed me to develop max kinetic energy in low ground effect before leaving low ground effect. That allowed me to save kinetic energy by just clearing obstacles rather than spending my extra zoom reserve airspeed going well over obstructions. Potential energy of even 100' of altitude became part of my envelope. So for many years and many flight hours I have not had to limit my envelope to shallow bank angles. Nor have I had to pull more than 1 g in turns of any bank angle. Yes, with zoom reserve airspeed, it helps to gain a bit of altitude wings level and lose a bit of that excess airspeed prior to banking. But any time I have had zoom reserve airspeed, that has become default as well. Is that why I am such a loosey goosey pilot not having to worry about inadvertent stall during turns at low altitude? I don't know. What's in your wallet?
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Re: Bank angle

Like any enemy, stall is always out there. We have to move the controls to learn what they do. We have to practice stalls, spins, upset, shear, turbulence, etc. to know what happens and how to recover. What, however, if we emphasized energy management to prevent stall rather than emphasize recovery from stall? What if we returned to Wolfgang's law of the roller coaster and designed dynamic neutral stability (what the airplane wants to do) rather than insisting on altitude maintenance at all cost? What if we taught ten student volunteers energy management turns as default other than on instruments and compared their stall fatality rate over a lifetime of flying with ten ACS only taught pilots. Wait, I have. I need that data.
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