How’s your Angle of Attack?

How’s your Angle of Attack?

For as long as I can remember, I ‘ve been infatuated with flying. (oddly enough, I’m also afraid of heights; my subconscious apparently assumes that if something goes wrong in an airplane, I’ll die for sure, whereas anything less, like falling off a roof, will only hurt me for life… LOL…)

Anyway, the other day I was practice-flying in my PC’s flight simulator, lining up for a landing on an aircraft carrier, when I messed up my “Angle of Attack.” That’s the angle of difference between oncoming wind and the centerline of your wing. I had gained altitude a little too fast and subsequently, lost a lot of airspeed. [Bear with me through some very basic flight dynamics.]  Losing too much speed in an airplane is never a good thing. See, the key element to stable flight is the speed of the air flowing over your wings. That’s how you generate lift. Lift is what keeps your plane in the sky. So I had lost speed, which made me enter the dreaded stall. Stalling simply means you no longer have enough lift to suspend your plane, and now you’re a giant piece of metal in the sky, headed for Sharksville.

Well, the simulator I use has military aircraft, and I was flying an F18, so I thought “Stall? I’m flying a jet, for crying out loud! No problem!” I shoved my throttle controls all the way up to full-power, hoping to kick in my afterburners. Guess what? Too late. No matter how much power I applied, there simply wasn’t enough air passing over my wings. Even as my engines screamed with power, I went in to Tom Cruises’s “flat spin headed out to sea.” Yikes! At that point, no matter how much power I applied, I was doomed.

Luckily, I was high enough to still be in control of the airplane, and I only needed to recover from the stall. You might be surprised to know that the very first thing instructors teach new pilots about recovering from a spin is NOT to give it full power as I was inclined to do, but rather to pull the power completely back to idle.

What? Cut the power? That’s right!

You slow down, then just need to “fly the plane.” It might sound simple…and it is! Eventually, I was able to recover, although it was after a tense minute or so. Warning: If you use my flying tips, I just hope you can swim. Please do not take my accounts as directions for flying. PLEASE.

But later that night, I got to thinking. How many times in life do we go into a spin and feel completely our lives stall out and start spinning out of control? We try all the instinctual reactions like full-power, or maybe give in to panic mode. Neither is a corrective measure. Maybe the best course of action is to bring the throttle back, take a breath, and regain control of the situation with some patience and minimal corrections. Instead of trying to manhandle the situation, make small, coordinated adjustments relying on basic knowledge until you regain control. As I’ve said in other posts: “Sometimes when you don’t know what to do… just do SOMETHING.” It can be as small as calling a friend or cleaning out a closet. If you find some small task to accomplish that will put a positive check-mark in today’s list, maybe you can keep thinking with a clear head and heed off a full-scale panic about the situation.

We all get the wind knocked out of us now and again. Despite the fear and panic, know that you WILL recover.  It might take a little extra time or a little LESS effort, but your lungs will eventually fill back up and work. Overreacting won’t make it resolve any faster–all it will do is add to the stress of the situation. Maybe even make it worse.

As Marcus Lemonis from the TV show ‘The Profit’ says: “Trust the process.” It might not seem natural or logical, but if you follow the process, you will recover.

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
– Psalm 46:10

Share this post

Post Comment