Steep Takeoff Pull Up- Stall-Spin-Crash-Burn FOFFIENESS

[3WE]

Reposting from the other place, just for the sake of spurring forum traffic.

I have a certain amount of FOFieness, and one particular thing that will bug me is a good, "high-performance" takeoff pull up (From Row 35A where I don't have an ASI nor yoke)?

I envision an engine quitting followed by an immediate loss of speed, stall, spin, crash, burn. (Heck, sometimes I imagine that the plane will simply slide backwards, since we're pointed so upward [/moderate sarcasm])

Yes, this is illogical as the engines are powerful, the pilots (and Ottos) are good at speed control and most airliner stall accidents seem to happen at cruise or approach, and that I always enjoyed a good max-angle climb out in a 172 at 60 knots with no fear as I felt I was the ISGLTCPPOTH.

I also find situations such as jammed elevators/stabilizers and that recent load-shift in the 747 to be sad.

But, I recently discovered that my smartphone GPS works in the airplane mode and I've been monitoring speeds (as well as our route on Google maps).

It helps a LOT to NOT_see the speed decay as we point more and more upwards and rocket skyward! Seeing the speed stay up mentally puts me back in a 172 at 60 knots with my hand on the yoke holding attitude just right to maintain it (and I thank the guys up front and Otto for doing exactly that).

However, I have noticed that often times as our altitude zooms our speed crisply marches upward to really fat dumb and happy levels- like 200 knots 3 minutes after liftoff!

But not always: Sometimes our speed stays slower and I've even seen it 'decay' a bit briefly hitting ~140 kts (although that may have been due to the fact that winds typically increase with altitude- so our airspeed may not have decayed at all...but I felt the decay was consistent with a perceived little bit of extra pull up ).

On another recent flight during latter descent- I saw us hit~120 knots while clean- just before the flaps started out (E-170)- closer to landing we were back around 135-140 kts (again, ground speed and not air speed acknowledged.)

More often than not, we do not hit final approach speed until fairly short final (yeah, true IMC/ILS is an exception).

I think some of my observations are due to flying out of a not-so-busy airport. This gives the pilots a lot more speed flexibility and hey why keep your rocket ship flying slow, when it's purpose is to go fast.

Conversely, some of the slower climb outs seem to be at busy places like Atlanta or Philadelphia- where no doubt the airspace is more full and planes may be kept slower until they start going their separate ways.

There's also another important bottom line: Pilots doing the incomprehensible relentless pull up maneuvers are pretty rare, but it's fun to be getting speed and route information- especially since I so rarely fly "heavy jets" with all the fancy IFE / flight tracking stuff.

Thoughts?

[flyboy2548m]

No.

[3WE]

No.

That's weak.

"Shut the hell up and deal with the fact that you have excellent statistical safety" is more better.

[ocelot]

(Heck, sometimes I imagine that the plane will simply slide backwards, since we're pointed so upward [/moderate sarcasm])

That used to worry me a lot. When I was eight.

[3WE]

(Heck, sometimes I imagine that the plane will simply slide backwards, since we're pointed so upward [/moderate sarcasm])

That used to worry me a lot. When I was eight.

Yes. Now that we are older and know that we will fall in a forward direction (aka Flydubious), it's much more comforting.

[ocelot]

Well, after I got MSFS and learned what happens in a SEL when you pull up relentlessly, the idea stopped bothering me. I think this was less because I thought it would or wouldn't happen and more because I thought I would know if it started to happen. Something like that. It's curious how these things work...

[3WE]

...I thought I would know if it started to happen...

This brings up another subject.

When thinking of the "typical" Air-France-type relentless pull up, they are not seeing what one sees in a 172M nor a 172MSFS...It's a big, giant, heavy chunk of aluminum (epoxy-resin-carbon-fiber), jet fuel, souls and suitcases that stalls gently and only a little TV telling you what's up and down.

I fear I (and Gabriel) may have been too vocal in the "what in the hell were they thinking" dept. Nav (I think) once said that a stall in a swept wing plane was a rather gentle affair...no nice big shudder and clear break, but a smooth-yet-prompt development of a rapid sink rate. (Flyboy has also said some interesting stuff which "we" ignored)

Still, I think the fundamental concept that relentless pull ups are generally a bad idea + stall warning systems ought to give some of these folks a clue, but of course, I'm just flying my keyboard...

[Gabriel]

Of course I don't agree. Remember the last words (well, ones of the last): "But I've been pulling up all the time". Duh.

Not to mention that they had 3 perfectly working attitude indicators, 3 perfectly working altimeter, 2 perfectly working vertical speed indicators, and a perfectly working stall warning that speaks plain English, all of which showed very clearly the relentless pull-up first and the relentless stall then.

You mention the giant metal-carbon-plastic-fuel-pax-cargo mass. However, they managed very well to extract 1.5 Gs from it in the relentless pull up to put the nose 15 deg up and the VSI 7000 fpm up.

[3WE]

Of course I don't agree. Remember the last words (well, ones of the last): "But I've been pulling up all the time". Duh.

Not to mention that they had 3 perfectly working attitude indicators, 3 perfectly working altimeter, 2 perfectly working vertical speed indicators, and a perfectly working stall warning that speaks plain English, all of which showed very clearly the relentless pull-up first and the relentless stall then.

You mention the giant metal-carbon-plastic-fuel-pax-cargo mass. However, they managed very well to extract 1.5 Gs from it in the relentless pull up to put the nose 15 deg up and the VSI 7000 fpm up.

Yes... I think my main point it that it may enter the stall gently, thus maybe requires cognitive thinking instead of cowboy-instinctive-immediate-direct-gluteal-triceps-muscle-memory-emergency-stick-shover mechanisms.

Didn't mean to fan your flames... or maybe I did mean to...

[Gabriel]

I already told you the story when I transitioned to the C-152 (only to quickly return to the Tomahawk that I enjoyed much more and was much more comfortable). I was used to full stalls in the Tomahawk that were quite violent and always with a good wing drop. So I was there in the Cessna with the instructor practicing power-off stalls, throttle was idle, yoke was against my chest, with mushy but fair control on the ailerons, the stall warning was active in the high-pitch mode, and I said "this thing won't stall". To what the instructor replied "Ah, no? Your nose is high, you are doing 40kts and descending 2000 fpm. You, sir, are stalled".

I would say it was very much an Air France stall, in small scale. We could have keep doing that all the way to pancaking into the Rio de la Plata. If only I had kept "pulling up all the time".

(Math performed later confirmed what the instructor was saying: 2000 fpm = 20 kts (it is amazing how four randomly defined units of length and time -ft, NM, min, hour- combine to form such a nice conversion factor of about 1:100, it's almost metric!!!). So we have 40 kts along the flight path and 20 kts that's a gradient of 30 deg, plus a couple of degrees that the nose was up gives an AoA of slightly above 30 degrees. Even if the instruments were inaccurate due to the high AoA (pitot and static port affected), the AoA was undoubtedly huge.)

[Gabriel]

Double post deleted

[3WE]

I already told you the story when I transitioned to the C-152...

Had you flown a real airplane, like a 172, you would know that the stall-break is clear and tangible...I swear there's a muffled thump when it lets go...and it does suddenly drop out from underneath you.

...and while it does_not require super genius airmanship to prevent a spin, it can favor one wing over another given crossed controls or full-power-'torque'.

[ocelot]

a perfectly working stall warning that speaks plain English

That's the problem! Quest-ce qu'il dit? Il pense-que que nous sommes rosbifs?