Dive Bombing Lessons

And now for something completely different, I want to write about a student pilot experience.

One day while I was learning to fly, Dave Bradley came out to the plane as I was finishing my preflight inspection. He said that since it had been a couple of weeks since I had flown, he wanted to review some of the maneuvers to get me back in the saddle, so to speak. He wanted to do some slow flight, steep turns, and stalls. Then we could do some short- and soft-field landings.

"I've never done stalls," I said.

"Sure you've done stalls," he replied confidently. "You just came back from your long cross-country. You can't do that without stall training."

"I did. You let me go," I said.

"No. I wouldn't let you go without stalls. You just don't remember them," he suggested.

"Oh, I'm sure I would remember stalls," I assured him. "I am terrified of them." I got out my logbook and handed it to Dave. He scrutinized the entries.

"Well, I'm surprised that I overlooked that..." he mused. "I guess we'll just have to do them today!"

I didn't look happy. "I think I'm going to wet my pants," I said.

"Well, change clothes before you get in the plane!" He climbed in.

I was feeling a little dizzy already. The specter of stalls had loomed before me ever since I saw the word in the training syllabus. To me, stalling the plane meant a death spiral into the ground, followed by explosion, smoke, and flame. But I got into the plane anyway. I thought I might as well get this over with.

We climbed to 3,000 feet AGL (above ground level) and Dave says, "Okay! Stall the plane."

I said, "Let's pretend that I have never stalled a plane before, and you tell me how it is done." I think he still thought that I had done this before but had forgotten.

He humored me. "For the power-off stall, you put on carb heat, pull the throttle to idle, keep back pressure on the yoke to maintain altitude. When the plane gets down to about 45 knots airspeed, you'll hear the stall warning horn go off, and a couple of knots lower than that the nose will drop. When that happens, release back pressure on the yoke, and the plane will start flying again. Add throttle to return to straight and level flight. Turn off carb heat."

I looked at him with dread in my eyes.

"Ready?" he asked.

"No," I admitted. "But here goes..." I did what he said. I was sweating. My heart was pounding. My hands were shaking. My knees were knocking. My teeth were probably chattering. The stall warning horn went off and scared the crap out of me. I know I jumped in my seat. My eyes were bugging out with fear. I'd never experienced having the plane's nose so high. All I could see was the sky. The horn was blaring. I was about to jump out of my skin waiting for the nose to drop.

Then it happened. The nose started to fall and I felt that falling sensation in the pit of my stomach. I was scared stiff. The passage of time switched to slow motion. I decided that we were falling, not flying. I wanted the plane to fly again as quickly as possible. If releasing the back pressure on the yoke would do it, then to get it to fly again even more quickly...

I shoved the yoke as far forward as it would go and jammed the throttle to the wall.

The plane immediately pointed its nose straight toward the ground. That falling sensation I felt earlier in my stomach became a serious sensation of falling, because we were headed down at full throttle. I was aghast at what was happening. This was going so wrong! We weren't flying! We were going to crash into the ground! Way off in the distance, it seemed, Dave was yelling, "YEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAA!!!" I looked over, and he had braced himself with his hand against the roof of the plane. I thought he had lost his mind because he had a huge grin on his face.

An eternity later, my wits returned and I reduced the throttle and pulled back on the yoke to get us back to straight and level flight. Dave was totally cool and professional - "Let's regain our altitude and try that again."

I thought I was going to cry. I also didn't feel so well. But I piloted the plane back up to three thousand AGL and we did it again, but without the diving this time. We did it again and again until I could get the plane flying with a loss of altitude of less than fifty feet. Then we went back to the field.

After landing and walking (shakily, on my part) back to the office, I uttered the ritual question to everyone inside - "Did you guys see that landing?" Of course, if they said they did, I would have to come up with some excuse about why it was so bad. If they said they didn't, I got to brag about how good it was. I can't remember what they said that day. But I remember what Dave said.

"You know, Paul," he said, seriously. (Paul was the other instructor.) "Those little Cessnas don't go very fast even straight down."

Paul looked up from what he was doing. He glanced at me. I'm sure I was white-faced. "Oh," he said. "Did we go straight down today?"

"We did," Dave acknowledged. "You know, I think we should open up a dive bombing school. I think Sam's a natural at it."