Podcast: Rich Stowell On Stall Awareness and Training

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Pilot stall training often prioritizes recovery over avoidance.
  • Despite efforts since the 1990s, effective stall/spin awareness training isn't consistently implemented.
  • Expert Rich Stowell highlights the FAA's Advisory Circular 61-67C as a valuable resource for improved stall training.
  • The current training system focuses on minimal standards for checkrides, rather than comprehensive safety.
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Anyone who studies aircraft accidents in detail will eventually get around to observing that pilots are trained (a) to pass checkrides and (b) to minimal standards to accomplish that. That’s especially true of stall training, which emphasizes recovery rather than avoidance.

In this podcast, the third of a five-part series on stall awareness, we talked to Rich Stowell, a nationally recognized expert on upset recovery, stalls and especially spins, of which he has done thousands.

“Since the early 1990s, there’s been a movement toward incorporating stall/spin awareness training throughout all the different levels of pilot training. But I think the problem is a lot of that information doesn’t get translated into the training environment. We’re not doing as good a job as we can in getting that information to the pilots,” Stowell says.

Rich Stowell

And one source of that information, he says, was developed and updated by the FAA in the early 1990s and is found in Advisory Circular 61-67C.  “It talks a lot about training exercises that should be incorporated into training,” Stowell adds.

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