I don't get the obsession with stall behavior

I can understand why this seems to make sense, but if you really examine it, there are problems.

The thing is that an airplane - especially a GA airplane - can’t be flown purely mechanically; there is some “feel” involved. That’s a difficult-to-define term, but in general, it’s the idea that you’re familiar enough with your aircraft that you constantly have an accurate mental model of where it is and what it’s doing in terms of performance and energy state. This can’t be done simply by reference to a number, say an airspeed value that’s taught as a “minimum safe speed” in the pattern. Things like this quickly fall apart when you get distracted with traffic, or a stronger than expected wind, or a hundred other things, and accidentally let your bang angle and load factor increase… and suddenly, that minimum “safe” speed you’ve had pounded into your head is well into a stall.

You have to be able to feel the wing, to understand what it’s doing. You can’t achieve that level of familiarly unless you regularly fly the plane in those regimes, and gain experience there. Doing a simplified stall series once every couple years on a flight review is entirely inadequate for this.

When I learned to fly - granted, almost 30 years ago - part of the syllabus for almost every solo lesson was for the student to practice a full stall series, as well as slow flight… and this was before we even had our Private licenses.

We’ve gotten too far away from stick and rudder flying in flight training, in an effort to make flying more accessible for more people. One of the worst things the FAA ever did was to remove spin training from the Private PTS.

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