Full Stalls in Falcon 20

[falcondriver]

Has anybody done full stalls in a Falcon 20? What are the dangers? I had a conversation with a pilot that let a co-pilot do a power off stall in a Falcon 20. He scared himself to death. I've done all the stall series in the plane and the sim but never a full power off stall.
FD

 

[Fitzy]

I've never flown a Falcon, but my brother said you will probably crash!!!



If your asking that question!!

 

[CRJ200FO]

I've never flown a Falcon 20, but most swept-wing aircraft will behave relatively the same in a stall. There are several reasons why full stalls are dangerous in swept wing aircraft.

Jets power themselves out of near stalls very easily. Full stalls however would require the nose to be lowered considerably. You could easily lose 10,000+ feet on a full stall recovery. Since most jet operators do stall training at 10,000 msl, you can see how that might be a problem.

Another serious problem is controllability. Most swept-wing aircraft have very unresponsive aileron control close to stall speed. However, rudder control is heightened do to the high angle of attack right before reaching full stall. If the airplane were to start to roll to one side just before the stall, and you were to put in rudder to correct just as the stall broke, the airplane would likely roll inverted.

The only CRJ-200 to have ever had a fatal crash was during early flight testing. The test pilots were putting the aircraft through full stalls at 15,000-20,000 feet and lost control of the aircraft. It was unrecoverable.

Again, the Falcon 20 might not be quite as touchy, but most jets behave very similar.

 

[Brett Hull]

I've done them in a lear 24. (yea, i know, it's not a falcon 20). My numb-nutted boss flew it through a hail storm. The leading edges had to be removed and repaired. There's something in the mx manual that says it has to be test flown by a learjet test pilot if the LE's are removed. I got to be the co-pilot.

We did 4 full stalls, from clean to full flaps. They all broke straight ahead, but he was working his arse off to make it do so. You could definitely tell she would have rolled over on her back if you were sloppy. We lost about 1000 feet in the recoveries.

 

[profile]

Not sure where anyone got the idea that full stalls are necessarily dangerous in swept wing jets, but it is definitely not true. The large transports are ALL tested through all full stalls, including what is essentially an accelerated stall series.

I do not know about the aircraft in question, but I do know that the Lears were all put through extreme stalls (up to 45 degree AoA or more) and were recovered during flight test. I would guess that the Falcon is the same. Does it have any special features, stick shakers, stick pushers, etc? That might tell us a bit more about how it behaved during flight test...