After we returned from vacation I spent the next few weeks visiting a few other flying schools to make sure I was picking the best available program to learn how to fly. I ended up going back to Caldwell and hooking up with Rick Perez, the instructor that I met my first time I visited the airport. We discussed what the training would entail and he explained the process I needed to follow to get my third class medical certificate and student pilot certificate. You don’t need the certificate to start training but you do need it before you solo so you have some time. So on May 8th I took my first hour lesson in N54752, a Cessna 172. The first few hours are pretty much basic fundamentals of flight and give you a chance to get comfortable with the whole idea of flying an airplane. Everything was going well until Rick mentioned we would be doing stalls on our next lesson. I had no idea what to expect so I was quite nervous and for a time thought about just calling it quits. Obviously I still wasn’t all on the same page inside, still battling the fear. What I really liked about Rick as an instructor was he spent a few minutes going over what we were going to do each lesson before we went up and that gave me a good idea what to expect. When we were going to be doing stalls he explained what a stall was. I thought he was going to stop the engine and then show me the procedure to get it restarted but it has nothing to do with the engine running or not running. A stall is nothing more than an inadequate amount of air flowing over the wings to sustain flight (I won’t get into the angle of attack part of stalls, it’s a bit too complicated for this purpose). When that happens the plane literally drops from the sky. The reason you practice stalls is to get to know what it feels like when the plane you are flying is about to stall. The most critical times that a stall can happen and cause major problems is when you are low and slow, as you will be when you take off and when you land. The way you practice stalls is to climb to around 3500 feet so you have plenty of room to recover and then simulate take off stalls and landing stalls. The take off stall is performed by going to full power and raising the nose as if you were taking off. You keep raising the nose until the speed slows and the amount of air flowing over the wings is not enough to sustain flight. Just before the plane stalls you will feel some buffeting of the airframe and that is a sure sign you are about to stall. When the plane actually stalls the nose drops and if you are not in coordinated flight (the ball centered on the turn coordinator) you will go in to a spin which will surely kill you when you are low and slow because there is not enough altitude to recover. The procedure to recover from a stall is to pull the power back to idle and lower the nose to increase the amount of air flowing over the wings (decreasing the angle of attack) and then slowly start to recover altitude. If you happened to enter a spin when you stalled after pulling the power back you would apply opposite rudder to the direction of the spin and then once you are no longer spinning slowly raise the nose to regain altitude. After Rick doing a couple of stalls I got my chance to try one. After the first few I actually got to like doing stalls, it sure is a good way to improve your slow speed handling of your airplane. The landing or power off stall is performed just the opposite from the power on stall. You slow the plane to landing speed and then raise the nose as if you were flairing the plane for landing. The more you raise the nose the slower you go and the less the air flows over the wings (high angle of attack) causing the plane to stall. The recovery is similar, you lower the nose and in this case you add power and slowly regain altitude.  From this point forward we did stalls just about every lesson to really get the feel of the plane when it is about to stall. Next up is steep turns, another maneuver that gives you a good feel of what happens when you make turns.