Learn › Maneuvers › Elevator Trim Stall Demonstration

Elevator Trim Stall Demonstration

Trim holds a speed, not an attitude. Add full power to an airplane trimmed for the approach and it goes looking for that speed the only way it can — by raising the nose.

Slow Flight, Stalls and Spins — FI.X.G

Why the demonstration exists

Most stall training happens in a tidy box. Wings level, one configuration, power where you put it, and a student who knows exactly what is about to happen. Airplanes in the real world stall in messier places than that, and one of the messiest is the go-around.

Picture the end of a stabilized approach. Full flaps, power near idle, and the airplane trimmed to hold the approach speed hands-off — in some airplanes that is close to full nose-up trim. Something puts you around: an airplane on the runway, a bounce, an instructor's call. You push the throttle to the stop, and the nose comes up on its own, hard. Angle of attack climbs toward critical while you are low, busy, reconfiguring, and looking out the window at the runway.

The demonstration takes that exact sequence and runs it at altitude, where a slow reaction costs feet instead of everything. It belongs to the group of stalls the Airplane Flying Handbook has the instructor demonstrate: it is flown by or with a qualified flight instructor, and it is not a solo practice item. What it teaches is not a maneuver you will ever be asked to fly on purpose. It is a lesson about maintaining positive control of the airplane when the trim is set for one flight condition and you have just commanded another.

What the trim is actually doing

Look at what the trim wheel is really connected to. It does not set an attitude; it relieves the control pressure needed to hold a given airspeed, and the airplane will keep working to return to that speed. Trimmed for approach speed at idle power, the airplane is set up to fly slowly. Add full power and it will not simply accelerate past the speed the trim is asking for — the surplus thrust turns into pitch instead, and the attitude climbs to absorb it.

Now the elevator is working against you instead of for you. Holding the nose down takes real, sustained forward pressure, and if you do not supply it the pitch attitude keeps increasing while the airspeed decays. Nothing about this requires the airspeed indicator to read slow first. The critical angle of attack can be exceeded at any airspeed, in any attitude, at any power setting, and a full-power nose-high go-around is as good a place to prove it as any.

Flying it

This is a demonstrated stall, flown with a qualified flight instructor aboard. The steps below are here so you can follow what your instructor is doing and, later, brief it yourself as an instructor. They are not a recipe for going out alone with a full-power nose-high stall entry near the trim's limit.

1. Clear the area, and pick an entry altitude that leaves recovery complete no lower than 3,000 feet AGL.
2. Reduce power and configure for landing — gear and flaps per your POH.
3. Establish a stabilized approach-speed glide and trim it off. The trim setting is the whole point of the demonstration; if you skip it you are only doing a power-on stall.
4. Advance the throttle smoothly to the maximum power your POH allows, as though going around, and hold the wings level and the airplane coordinated with rudder and aileron as the nose rises.
5. Recover as soon as the pitch attitude becomes excessive — the nose well above a normal climb attitude with the airspeed decaying — or at the first indication of the stall, whichever comes first.
6. Retrim, reconfigure, and return to the flightpath you started from.

Under high power with the airplane accelerating, the usual cues are muted. There is no quiet, no long slow deceleration, and the airframe buffet may be brief. What you get first is the stall warning and the feel of the controls going soft and unresponsive. Say those two out loud when you demonstrate it, because a student watching the airspeed indicator will miss both.

If it were allowed to go all the way, a full stall here announces itself as a wing dropping, the nose dropping, and a descent you cannot arrest by pulling. A stall flown uncoordinated can develop into a spin, and full power with the nose high is exactly where coordination is hardest to hold. That is why this one is recovered at the pitch attitude, or at the first indication, rather than flown to the break.

The recovery

Forward pressure comes first. Lower the nose to reduce angle of attack, and keep the nose-down input in until the stall warning stops. Pitch leads: not the trim, not the power, which is already in, and not the ailerons. Rolling the wings level comes immediately behind the angle of attack reduction, not several seconds later — the order matters, but so does promptness, and a bank allowed to build while you wait for the horn to go quiet is the beginning of the next problem.

Once the wing is flying again, fly a normal go-around. Keep the airplane coordinated as the power takes hold; in most single-engine trainers that means right rudder against the left-turning tendencies you have just fed with full power, but check how your own airplane behaves. Hold your heading and ground track — at altitude that is all there is to hold, and in the pattern it is where you would be lining back up with the runway centerline. Accelerate to a normal climb speed, retract flaps as the POH schedules them, and trim to the climb speed so the airplane stops fighting you. Then return to your desired flightpath. Trimming is part of the recovery, not something you tidy up afterward.

Where it goes wrong

The errors cluster in four places. Entering too low, so there is no room to be wrong. Adding the power before the airplane is actually trimmed for the glide, which produces a much gentler pitch-up and teaches the student nothing. Waiting too long to recognize what the airplane is doing. And over-controlling the recovery — shoving the nose down far enough to unload the airplane and build excessive speed, or winding in a fistful of nose-down trim so that you end up fighting it in the other direction.

The risks worth naming before you go are the ones that live outside the cockpit as much as inside it. An inadvertent stall or spin in the traffic pattern is the accident this demonstration exists to prevent, so treat altitude, terrain and traffic as hard limits. Turbulence, wind shear and high density altitude all shrink your margins and are all worse near the ground. And stall warning systems are an aid, not an authority: students who learn to fly the horn rather than the wing get caught out by the airplane that warns late, warns early, or does not warn at all.

Where you meet it next

The elevator trim stall carries a task of its own in the Flight Instructor ACS, under slow flight, stalls and spins; the code is listed with this lesson. You fly it and you talk your way through it, and the examiner is listening for whether you can explain the trim, not just survive the pitch-up.

It shares its recovery logic with the power-on stall, its coordination lesson with the cross-controlled stall, and its failure mode — a recovery rushed or left half-finished — with the secondary stall, while the spin lesson is where the uncoordinated version of all of it ends up. The cross-controlled stall and the secondary stall are instructor-demonstrated maneuvers too, and spin training is flown with an instructor as well. It is also the reason the go-around lesson teaches an ordered sequence — power, attitude, configuration — with the trim reset as soon as the airplane is climbing. All of them sit alongside this one in the maneuvers series.

You will also meet it without asking. Any time you add a lot of power with a lot of nose-up trim rolled in — a missed approach, a balked landing, a low-altitude level-off after a long descent — the airplane will do the same thing. Knowing what that pressure in your hand means, and reaching for the trim wheel without being told to, is the whole return on the demonstration.