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The article doesn't mention near misses. How many stalls occur that crews safely recover their planes from? Can we learn anything from their circumstances?



I'm guessing this is a normal occurrence that isn't worth collecting statistics on. Recovering from a stall is simple; it's something you'll do very early in flight training (well before your first solo flight).

Planes crash when a lot of things go wrong at once. In the case of the Colgan Air crash, the problem was not the stall. The problem was that the pilots were sleepy, confused, and under-trained. The stall was too much for them because they were in a state where they could panic, and they didn't have the training to stop panicing and start flying the plane. So they randomly poked the controls, and that didn't save the plane.

Take two training pilots on a full 8 hour's sleep, and the stall probably wouldn't have even happened. If it did, a "whoa" would have been exchanged and they might have gone around for another landing approach. But I don't think it would be a big deal, it's just some randomness that is par for the course when you are trying to float twenty tons of metal through the air.


I'm a glider pilot, and I'm close to stalling every time I fly. It's just something that's part of the regular procedure: You recognize when it's about to happen, and take the appropriate action (which is to ease down on the stick and maintain correct angle of attack). If you're at a reasonable altitude, there is no danger involved. However, I'm pretty sure that an airliner operating regularly practically never approaches a stall condition.




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