Several Spontaneous Stalls In Cessna 152?

My first post here! I had a very odd experience today on my 3rd day with MSFS. I flew from my home airport of KLNA to MYGF (short flight from Florida to the Bahamas). So I’m not sure if this is a Bermuda triangle easter egg or something?

Anyway, on the way back to Florida I experienced 4 or 5 sudden stalls I was not able to recover from. A few of the times happened when I was doing multiple monitor “clicking”. I had a few dialog windows, like the VFR map on the other monitor. I figured something might be going on when I focus from one monitor to the other as that triggered the stall at least once or twice.

Another stall happened after I saved the flight, mid-flight. It came back from the click on resume to falling like a rock. A reload of the save loaded the flight almost okay, I lost about 400 feet but was expecting the stall. Unrelated, earlier in the day I paused a different flight and then when I resumed fell like a rock from the sky.

On all stalls, my airspeed was between 75 to 90 knots, altitude between 5,000 to 6,000 feet and no more than 1 degree AOA.

Once stall I was being very careful on. I was leveling off near 6,000 feet. I had dialed back the engine to 2200 RPM, was level, and cruising around 85 knots. Then it was like I hit something or deployed a parachute. There was a bang sound and the airspeed dropped way faster than any way I could even tried to attempt on purpose.

So, am I doing something wrong with flight dynamics or is MSFS just buggy with airspeed in some circumstances? Was I hitting other aircraft?

I’m not a pilot but have been flying sims for almost 40 years, have a degree in aerospace engineering, and constantly thinking of getting my PPL, lol.

** Edit **
The default bindings for trim on the Thrustmaster throttle control (T.16000m full flight pack) were bleeding through and causing unexpected large jumps in trim. This results in a situation where reducing throttle can cause a sudden hard pitch up. This happens without even touching the trim buttons. It’s simply moving the throttle position.

Removing the trim bindings off the throttle fixed the problem.

Strange, this has never happened to me (but I fly the JPLogistics Cessna 152 realism mod). Maybe it was some strong gust of wind, 30 knots or so blowing from the back and making the airplane suddenly instant-stall?

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The Cessna 152 is one of my favorite planes. There’s nothing wrong with the plane. Every plane has a different feel to it. You stalled b/c your air speed. There are other planes that won’t stall at those speeds, but the 152 will. You’ll just need to fly it more :slight_smile:

As far as your other stall, that happened because when you use the pause feature, you more than likely throttled down, which would be understandable because if you pause it, you’re pausing it to do something so you probably didn’t want to hear the engine so you throttled down. When you unpause it, if you didn’t throttle back up, your air speed when you unpause will be significantly lower, which is more than likely why you stalled that time.

Day 3 huh? You’re in for such a long wonderful journey :slight_smile:

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That last time it happened without me interacting with any menus was kind of like that. Weather conditions were set to live but conditions appeared to be very calm. The airspeed just fell 40 knots in about 1/2 a second. Does the aircraft even have a way to slow that fast?

I re-flew the flight several times between 5:30PM and 10:00PM EDT until I managed to not crash. I also had 3 CDTs, so it was a frustrating evening of all kinds of crashing.

On the way over, I did get a hard bump ever so briefly in a similar spot.

Could there be some kind of weather anomaly in the sim when crossing the international boundary? Each time it was shortly after leaving Bahamian airspace.

I really hate all the Bermuda triangle conspiracy stuff. :laughing:

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The “Pause” function AFAIK does not work correctly. When you pause and resume the plane often crashes.

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It probably helps to add I have a Thrustmaster t-16000m setup with rudder pedals. On the pauses I wasn’t intentionally interacting with the throttle. But there may have been a circumstance where my sim window did not have focus and I was making an adjustment. I’ve noticed in those cases the inputs don’t get registered until I click the mouse back on the monitor.

So issues with pausing, and possible monitor focus, do explain quite a few of the stalls. However, there is that one where I lost 40 knots just after dialing the throttle back by 100 RPM at near level attitude. I was trimmed, hands off the yoke and just trying to maintain altitude. At the time I was hyper vigilant given all the CTDs and prior stalls, all of which kept happening between Grand Bahama Island and the Florida coast.

I uninstalled the Realtek audio drivers and after that didn’t get a CTD.

Keep flying the plane. Don’t give up on it. Hopefully this was just a fluke session. Sometimes weird stuff can happen. ATC sometimes will automatically approve frequency change, other times they’ll tell me to continue for X departure and then they’ll approve frequency change. I’ve seen them switch it up with the same exact time of day and weather settings. But usually a restart of the flight or restart of the sim fixes it and other things.

If anyone is interested the flight plan was departing MYGF on runway 06 to KLNA runway 10 on December 30th just after sunset. I’m not sure if the weather data persists as it was live.

The one stall I can confirm didn’t happen from interacting with the sim’s UI happened around 6,000 feet not too long after leaving Bahamian ATC.

The final flight I made, and survived, I didn’t exceed 5,000 feet and kept the throttle higher at 2300 RPM.

Just a follow up, I flew the route a few more times and didn’t seem to be having any more issues.

I do think there is some kind of odd interaction with the inputs in some situations I haven’t quite figured out. Something I noticed it when interacting with a detached sim window, other items in the cabin can get triggered. It’s like the is mouse ghosting.

I’m doing as full realism as I can, including full engine startup, taxi, etc.

I crashed twice today as my trim managed to get way out of whack before take off. Lesson learned is to always check.

Thanks everyone for the support!

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More digging, I discovered adjusting the Thrustmaster throttle control can have large impacts on the trim.

A quick movement of the throttle to a lower percentage can bump up the trim a rather large number.

For instance, going from 80% to 20% can under some circumstances bump the trim to +1% or higher. This seems like a very likely stall cause.

The only thing I think on there that can adjust trim are the big flappy paddles on the throttle. But they don’t seem to work very consistently. When I press on them, them move the trim very slow or not at all.

Michail, not sure if these things got mentioned…

  1. Pause in FS kinda freezes your plane, but the sim keeps running (they call it ‘active pause’ or some such thing), anyhow, the plane actually continues on its merry way and you don’t see it… SO, in effect if you didn’t have the auto pilot on, any number of conditions could have occurred and caused the stall. As soon as you unpause you catch up with your ill fated plane and have an emergency on your hands. Leave it paused long enough and the plane will crash and you get the crash dialog box. The only REAL pause in this version is the ESC key.

  2. As far as stalls while you’re flying, and you state you have some aero engineering background, I’ll assume I can take your flight condition at face value. (meaning your AOA and airspeed were ok). This leaves a weight and balance issue (over fueled??) or, perhaps pitot tube ice, if you iced your pitot tube, the airspeed would stick at whatever its last valid value was and you’d be indicating 95 or whatever, and actually could be MUCH slower. Pitot heat for the win!

  3. Above someone stated that 152’s run around stalling at all kinds of airspeeds, thats not really accurate, but as an aero guy, I assume you do know that a stall can happen at any speed if you were to exceed the critical angle of attack. I assume you’d know what that would look like. But flying straight and reasonably level the 152 shouldn’t stall at any normal cruise speed.

I hope some of these thoughts help. Happy new year.

Aviate - Navigate - Communicate.

Don’t Pause the Sim - that’s broken.

Keep in the Flight - depart for whatever reason - and just like IRL - it’s going to go belly up.

(You wanted a real Sim - you got one)

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A 152 in reality is petty easy to fly. It stalls (if you want to call what it does a stall) at around 35kts, and it protests mightily before doing so. You really have to force it.

So nothing about this sounds right. I’ve never tried the sim 152, but my only guess is a severely abrupt weather transition / instantaneous sheer from a headwind to a tailwind. I’ve never had that happen but can see how the sim would interpret it this way. Did you have live weather turned on?

Regarding throttle and trim, I’d recommend deleting any bindings you don’t use. If you use the stick hat switch for trim, clear any trim assignments from anything else. Controllers can occasionally send transient signal spikes, especially when being moved. Might be a loose connection on your throttle paddle switch that is closing and creating a trim runaway as you move the throttle.

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Thanks, Point #1 did get me a few times.

I think all other may have been that issue with the thrustmaster throttle from the post above. I’m not sure why reducing throttle is causing a trim up but it’s definitely a bad combo!

I distinctly remember setting my trim prior to beginning taxi. On takeoff I had a premature takeoff/crash and then noticed my trim setting had changed.

Later I was messing with the control settings and cockpit views and noticed the trim wheel was moving with the throttle.

It’s just making large jumps when I move the throttle, yet if I try to adjust the trim on the throttle it either doesn’t move or moves very slow.

Check your controls to make sure you don’t have a duplicate mapping… Sometimes you get one button or axis assigned to multiple commands and the results can be quite surprising.

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Oh, and just remembered, make sure to turn off all the AI assists, could your AI co pilot be making changes? Shut all that stuff off.

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I have the Thrustmaster throttle with a Gladiator NXT. Awhile ago I was having spontaneous stalls mid-flight that were non-recoverable. In some cases it did exactly as you describe where I could simply move the throttle and it will spike my trim. What I did to fix was to remove all the default bindings on the throttle except for the throttle axis itself (I later have added my own bindings that I use. I have run into a couple of random stalls recently in flights from Colorado Springs to Pueblo but I think those may be because the ATIS was reporting winds at 252 knots as I’ve also been flying some Neofly missions around Sydney, AUS and not having issues at all (COS/Pueblo is around 6,000 Ft. too so the plane should and does handle a lot differently!).

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That’s what I did and the trim changing with throttle seems to have stopped!

Had I not been messing around on the ground so much I may have never noticed the trim wheel moving with the throttle.

Anyway, this was a super cool learning experience. I was about to give up on the idea of learning to fly for real.

Yup, I have everything turned off. I even got rid of the notifications as they were very distracting.

I’m keeping the ATC communications on as I’m trying to learn that better. Although today I was cleared to land and had a jumbo come in on top of me. I guess that’s not exactly working so smooth either, lol.

Yesterday I made a flight with the Carenado Seneca, and two times one of the wings was suddenly stalling a little bit and the Seneca was flying a curve for some seconds because of one wing having fall down to a 60° angle.
This happened when entering mountain areas - interesting turbulences and downdrafts just as said in this YouTube tutorial video about mountain flying.
I think these stalls are harsh side winds or downdrafts.