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Power-Off Stalls

A power-off stall rehearses the stall waiting at the bottom of an approach that went wrong — same configuration, same low airspeed, same instinct to pull. You fly it at altitude so that you recognize it in the pattern.

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

Why you practice it

The scenario is ordinary. You are coming in to land with the power back, you realize you are low, and you pull to stretch the glide. A stabilized final is not flown at the edge of the stall — something near 1.3 times the full-flap stall speed is the usual target, comfortably above the bottom of the white arc — but the margin is small in absolute terms, and the pull adds angle of attack directly. Spend enough of that margin and the wing runs out of it in the last few hundred feet, where there is no altitude to trade.

That is the airplane the maneuver reproduces: power at idle, flaps out, airspeed low and getting lower. A power-off stall is a landing stall, flown with several thousand feet underneath you instead of several hundred.

Stalls are worth being a little uneasy about at first, and the way through that is understanding rather than avoidance. Most of what causes this one is how the approach is flown, and that part is yours. Not all of it is: wind shear, a downdraft on short final, wake turbulence off the airplane ahead, or an engine that quits and tempts you into stretching a glide all push the same way, and none of them ask permission. That is an argument for the practice rather than against it. The only reason you practice stalls is recognition and recovery — enough repetitions that you catch the airplane at the first cue and act without deliberating.

What is actually happening

A stall occurs when the wing exceeds its critical angle of attack — the angle between the chord line and the relative wind. At low angles the air flows smoothly over the upper surface. As the angle increases, the flow begins to separate near the trailing edge and the separation works forward, while lift keeps building. Lift is at its maximum at the critical angle. Past that angle the separation spreads rapidly over the upper surface and lift falls away.

Angle of attack is the only thing that stalls a wing. You can exceed the critical angle at any airspeed, at any attitude, and at any power setting. The published stall speed in your POH is a useful proxy, but it holds only at one weight, one center of gravity, one configuration, and one G. Bank, and load factor raises stall speed in proportion to its square root. Add weight, move the CG forward, or put frost on the wing, and the number moves again.

What sets it up on final

Three things put airplanes into this stall. Poor energy management — arriving low and slow, then asking the elevator to fix an altitude problem. An uncoordinated, skidding turn from base to final, bottom rudder used to tighten up onto centerline, which is the setup that turns a stall into a spin; that combination has its own maneuver, the cross-controlled stall, and it is an instructor demonstration — flown dual, at altitude, with a CFI aboard, and never practiced solo. And an improper flare — rounding out high and continuing to pull as the airplane runs out of speed.

All three have the same answer: a stabilized approach, pitch and power used for what each is good at, and the ball centered throughout. In gusty conditions, use the gust or turbulence correction your POH gives; where the manufacturer specifies none, the common rule of thumb is to add half the gust factor to your approach speed. A gust can change the relative wind enough to take a wing past the critical angle at a speed that looked safe.

Flying the maneuver

1. Run your maneuver checks, pick a field you could glide to, and clear the area.
2. Choose an entry altitude that lets you complete the recovery no lower than 1,500 feet AGL.
3. Configure for approach or landing per your POH and reduce power to a stabilized descent at your normal approach speed.
4. Pick a visual reference. Straight ahead, hold heading within 10 degrees; in a turning entry, hold a bank of no more than 20 degrees.
5. Bring the power to idle and raise the nose smoothly to a pitch attitude that will induce the stall, staying coordinated the whole way up.
6. Hold that attitude until the stall is full — the break, and the loss of control effectiveness that comes with it — then recover promptly. The power-off stall task is flown to a full stall at every certificate level. Recovering at the first indication is the standard for slow flight and for the accelerated stall, not for this maneuver, and a student who has only ever recovered at the warning arrives at the checkride never having seen the thing being tested.
7. Recover in order: angle of attack first, then wings level, then power, then the flaps back up on the schedule below.
8. Establish the climb at Vx or Vy, then return to your entry altitude, heading, and airspeed.

Recognizing it

The airplane tells you twice. The impending stall arrives as mushy controls that need larger inputs for the same result, less engine and airflow noise, airframe buffet as separated air washes over the tail, and whatever stall warning your airplane carries. That last cue is type-specific: a reed horn, an electric horn, a light, an angle-of-attack display, and a few airplanes give no aural warning at all. Find out which one you have, and how much margin it is set to give, before you go up.

Most trainers are built to separate at the wing root first, so the ailerons stay in attached air a little longer and the stall stays benign and predictable. How that is achieved differs by type — geometric washout twisting the wing, stall strips on the leading edge, a different airfoil at the root — so treat it as a fact about your airplane rather than about wings in general, and read what your POH says about its stall characteristics.

The full stall is loss of lift and loss of control effectiveness together: the nose drops, a wing may drop, and the descent is not arrested by pulling back. If a wing drops and you are uncoordinated, you have the ingredients for a spin — which is its own instructor-demonstrated territory, flown dual and at altitude.

Recovering

You are stalled because the angle of attack is too high, so the first input reduces angle of attack. Lower the nose decisively enough to break the stall. Only then level the wings, with coordinated aileron and rudder. The order matters: while the wing is still stalled, rolling aileron into a dropping wing raises that wing's angle of attack further and can deepen the drop. Reduce the angle first, and the roll control you want is there.

With the wings coming level, add power — as much as your POH allows for the configuration, which is what the Airplane Flying Handbook means by maximum allowable power. In most trainers recovering from a power-off stall that is close to the stop; in some airplanes and configurations it is deliberately less, and the POH is the authority, not the habit you picked up in a different type. Power does not un-stall a wing. It limits what the recovery costs you in altitude.

Because this stall is flown in the landing configuration, taking that configuration away is part of the recovery. Retract the flaps to the setting your POH specifies for a go-around, then the rest of the way on the schedule it gives as the airplane accelerates; if the gear retracts, bring it up once you have a positive rate of climb. Dumping all the flaps at once, at low speed, throws away lift at the moment you have least to spare.

The hard part is psychological. Real stalls happen close to the ground, where lowering the nose is the last thing you will want to do. Do it anyway. There is no other way out, and power without a reduction in angle of attack buys you nothing.

What goes wrong

The most common failures are recognition failures. Pilots watch the airspeed indicator and the inclinometer instead of feeling the airplane, and miss cues that were there for several seconds. Then the recovery is late, or late and violent. Coordination slips too: the slower you go, the more rudder it takes to hold heading, and that is how a training stall becomes a wing drop.

Then there is the secondary stall: raising the nose to stop the altitude loss before the wing is genuinely flying again, which puts you back over the critical angle with less altitude than you had the first time. It is common enough that it exists as a maneuver of its own, an instructor demonstration flown dual at altitude so that a student sees the mistake made deliberately. Holding the dive too long costs altitude you did not need to spend. The recovery is finished when the airplane is flying, and not before.

Two conditions belong in your risk assessment: turbulence and wind shear can trigger a stall warning at a comfortable-feeling speed, and high density altitude leaves you less climb performance to recover with, though indicated stall speed has not moved.

Where you meet it next

On the practical test this is a named task at every certificate level: flown from a straight approach or a turning one, recovered promptly after the full stall and no lower than 1,500 feet AGL — and as a CFI candidate, taught aloud from the right seat while you fly it.

Its mirror image is the power-on stall, the takeoff stall, where the same angle is reached with the throttle open; fly the pair and the point underneath both becomes obvious, that the wing does not care what the power is doing. Slow flight is where the margin above the stall stops being a number and starts being something you can feel. The maneuvers built on top of this one — the secondary stall, the cross-controlled stall, the elevator trim stall, and spins — are instructor demonstrations, flown dual at altitude with a CFI aboard and never practiced solo. And it returns on every normal approach and landing you make: the flare is a deliberate approach to the critical angle a few feet above the runway, which is this maneuver flown on purpose. All of those lessons sit in the ground school index alongside this one.