The Dreaded "Cross Controlled" Stall

It's a beautiful day in the Finger Lakes. I'm just clearing the air here. Looking right. Checking the left. There's some sailboats out there on Cayuga Lake. But I'm leveling here at 4,000 feet. And so, one thing if you ask any pilot, and I do this on pilot evaluations, what would happen if the plane was turning, and you stall, just about everybody seems to say, it's going to spin. And so we're going to experiment a little with that. Because if we're doing a flight test, we need aerodynamic knowledge. So I'm adding back pressure, and that incidentally is how much chrome is showing, is angle of attack. But as I bring it to a stall, lift is equal on the wings, all that happens is nothing. It starts to lose a little altitude. It doesn't even break in a turning stall, usually, because the airflow is not directly on the tail. If I turn right, bring some back pressure, and again, there's the angle of attack. There's a stall, and not much happens. Lift is equal on the wings. No roll off, just it falls away from the lift vector. So you ask people, well, when does it stall? And they say, well, if it's cross-controlled. So then we put in full left aileron. We add full right rudder. Put it in a full slip. And we see if cross-control is inherently dangerous. And all it does is sits there and wobbles and yells at you. There's full back pressure, full stall. All you have to do to recover is just release back pressure. So we release back pressure. There's the angle of attack is reduced. Plane's flying again. I didn't add any power. And all that fooling around, you can see that we only lost 1,000 feet. So a very powerful demonstration for any CFI. Turning stalls and a full slip, bring it to a stall, nothing much happens. These are tools for the CFI to create understanding in your pilots.