First - there’s nothing new under the sun and if it’s an actual maneuver I have no clue who actually invented it. But I had to figure it out on my own so would like to know is it a real maneuver and what’s it called?
Here’s the situation:
Headwind or gust induced stall.
Fall to one side of the wing tip into a nose-to-the-ground type situation.
The extremeness is a TAS of nearly 0 at times so it’s not just a true stall but complete loss of all reaction
Here’s the maneuver I found to get out of it with the least amount of altitude lost:
To whichever direction I fall, give that rudder and opposite yaw. If I’m falling left give left rudder and right yaw.
The aircraft will roll as it heads to the ground.
When aircraft is still pointed down but has rolled to basically what would be inverted: then completely switch rudder and yaw.
So if you were left rudder and right yaw, now hard right rudder and left yaw.
In this simple maneuver you seem to go from headwind to tailwind and back to headwind in a stable configuration having picked up some air speed.
If you allowed the game to take the controls you’d pretty much stall, roll over (invert) and recover with a tail wind which seems to be, in this case the glider’s, most stable configuration.
But I want the headwind for lift. You lose a tremendous amount of altitude without his maneuver.
The rudder into the slip brings you “inverted” quicker; the rudder out of the slip brings you back to the headwind quicker.
What am I doing? What’s it called and in real life I feel like this would tear your wings off!
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What you appear to be describing is a stall induced spin. A couple of corrections, though. A headwind gust is not going to stall the aircraft. A tailwind, maybe, if you are already flying slow like during an approach. You are also using the term yaw when I think you mean roll. Yaw is the left and right movement of the nose of the aircraft around the vertical axis and it is controlled by the rudders. It is relatively easy to stall one wing before the other. That’s why one wing can dip when entering a stall.
As to your recovery technique, If you apply full rudder in the same direction as the wing that has stalled, you will enter a spin if the angle of attack is high enough to stall both wings. If you try to roll in the opposite direction all you are going to do is exacerbate the problem.
The proper way to recover from a stall/spin event is:
Throttle to idle.
Neutralize the ailerons.
Apply and hold full rudder in the direction opposite to the spin.
Move the yoke briskly forward to break the stall. This is hard for a lot of people when they are looking straight down at the ground in a spin. The natural instinct is to pull back but if you don’t push forward you won’t recover.
Hold those control inputs until the rotation stops.
When the rotation stops, neutralize the rudder and gently recover from the resulting dive.
Yeah, you’re basically entering incipient spins and breaking out of them using the technique @MikeB54331mentioned. Fortunately for you, you’re doing it in a fairly controlled fashion, similar to what some aerobatic pilots do for certain maneuvers.
I wouldn’t recommend doing this in real life, outside of intentional aerobatics, which require a lot of experience and a proper aircraft, configuration, and altitude. But this is the sim, so have a blast!
Indeed, I have no intention of doing it IRL even if I do want to get a pilot license (which I may).
I have a phobia of skydying I mean skydiving…don’t need to add acrobatics to the list haha.
But I had to do something in the game; the weather conditions for my poor glider was too much but I was testing other things so had to overcome. And eventually you just get a feel for “well dang it if I do this then this happens better!”
The part here that interests me is I distinctly full rudder INTO the spin first. Now that I think about it though here’s why:
Again this is with a glider (by the way).
My first instinct was to resist the spin by hard rudder opposite the spin as you described to get me back into the heading I was on where the issue occurred.
I found this ends up delaying precious speed and thus altitude and thus time. By hard-ruddering in direction of spin first I quickly enter the spin and then can recover speed and thus perform the maneuver as you described. All of which sounds like improvements to what I’ve been doing.
In this way it’s sort of like making yourself puke as soon as you feel sick rather than waiting and making it a lot worse.
I WILL show videos of exactly what I do - but I have to explain them anyway because I don’t talk in the videos.
I concur I was mistaken about the headwind versus tailwind but here’s where I think I’m right in describing what happens but for the wrong reasons.
The issue occurs in a headwind in the glider. With headwind there is lift but your true air speed slows. With a tailwind there is sink but your true air speed increases.
In a stable condition you could have a true airspeed of zero but actually climb and in the glider I have done it. I don’t know if that is possible in real world or recommended, but it is in MSFS 2020.
Something happens, a gust maybe, when the TAS is near zero, and you slip out of this stability and the glider wants to seek tail wind. This is probably because physically the drag is at the front of the aircraft and drag seeks the velocity vector. It’s why a space capsule re-enters the earth with the most drag forward.
This actually might explain the “physics” of the slip into spin in the first place. If the drag of the aircraft is toward the nose and the headwind is creating drag as I believe it does? Then when the true air speed of the aircraft reverses your vector is now in the direction of the tail wind, your aircraft’s drag points down wind, causing the flip to occur.
Anyway – while that may be out of the scope of the discussion here it’s interesting to describe even if my reasons are wrong.
Once the true air speed drops so badly that a flip is about to happen I accelerate the happening by rudder to the direction of the spin (slip) first…I only perform the actual maneuver as you describe after the aircraft has inverted which is to say…
If you pointed the nose straight to the ground from level flight, then inverted would be to roll 180deg and do the same thing. That configuration is the inversion I mean. If you look up you’re looking downwind when you’re inverted and pointing at the ground.
Sorry if I’m long…winded…(pun hehe) but when I get a video of it you’ll probably have fun reviewing it.
I heard this from pilot friends but didn’t realize it until you spoke it. Either subconsciously their lessons stuck or I just intuitively stumbled on it. Here’s the way I can describe what it “feels like” though.
The extremeness of the stall/spin is so overwhelming that really you just have to let go of everything. And other than the rudder/yaw controls that’s essentially what I do for most of the spin. If the aircraft is not breaking apart then really that’s the only thing I could do.
Any attempt to resist certain parts of the spin only prolonged the spin which lost even more altitude.
Instead by letting the aircraft just…be an aircraft…it pretty much would break the spin on its own. Of course this is a 58x glide ratio glider and not a powered aircraft so I’m not saying do nothing will have best outcome.
But doing nothing has a better outcome than doing the WRONG THING which as you mentioned is the pulling up to pull out of the spin.
Again back to the reason why I actually induce the spin as fast as possible is because the whole point of a spin is you lost airspeed and therefore aerodynamic control.
The spin is rebuilding airspeed even if it seems like it’s super chaotic at first. And the more comfortable I got surviving these occurrences, the more I realized it’s not even chaotic. It’s pretty straightforward what’s happening in the spin.
You “flip direction” and invert, the only reason you spin is you have extra angular momentum in the roll. That is easily corrected at the inversion point.
It’s that inversion point that you hard rudder opposite the spin to arrest the roll.
The counter yaw keeps wings level.
The plane then pitches up sheerly by its own aerodynamics.
Power idle Ailerons neutral Rudder opposite Elevator forward (sharply)
Spin training IRL is fun, by the way. I had a great primary instructor who took me through it (I think she liked it and was having fun)… she asked first if I wanted to since it can be a bit… uncomfortable. I said heck yea. It’s a great skill to have and I wish more CFIs took students through actual spin recovery.
Unless you’re getting into airspeeds where mechanical flutter or Mach compression take effect, your aircraft always aerodynamically behaves based on indicated airspeed (IAS).
True airspeed (TAS) has no effect whatsoever on aerodynamics, rather it is a measurement of how fast you’re actually, geometrically moving through the “fluid” of the air (and subsequent effects of groundspeed depending on which way the “fluid” is also moving), which is important for navigation (including distances and gradients).
The difference between indicated and true speed comes down to variations in air density (temperature and pressure).
Once your wings exceed the critical angle of attack, they will stall. A spin requires both wings to be stalled, but one is more stalled than the other, creating a continuous rolling and yawing (except in the case of a flat spin, which is yaw only), autorotative moment until it’s broken by reducing the angle of attack below critical, or hitting an object.
When you kick the rudder over in the direction of the incipient spin, you are doing a couple things, but primarily, you’re speeding up the “outside” wing, reducing its angle of attack slightly enough that even though it’s still stalled, it’s producing more lift than the inside wing, aggravating this further into the spin.
This is just educational for me so what I describe is accurate but I’m probably using all the wrong terms etc. I’ll have to look for an IAS on my glider next time I try this: I’ve only been looking at the TAS and when that drops below a certain amount is when the flip occurs. At least I’m thinking it’s the TAS. I’ll verify all that today.
Yes and that makes sense; and for the purpose of why I corrected the reasoning for doing that part of this maneuver which is the only part that seems basically unnecessary, for at least in the game (and not real life) it seems best to just enter the spin as soon as it’s about to happen rather than to fight it any longer.
When I’ve resisted the spin, it becomes even worse and I lose a LOT more altitude.
When I play with this more I’ll probably make a proper video of it and demonstrate what I do and what I want from it and then see what people here think about that. For now I only have a flight video that is just my normal flying and involves some of this randomly.