How to Recover from a Stall (or Why Sometimes Letting Go and Doing Nothing is Best)
(Don’t try this at home!) Flying a small plane like a Cessna 172 Skyhawk is a hell of a lot safer than a 737 Max. Why? For a lot of reasons, but one is that for every 1000 feet of altitude the plane will glide 3 miles without the engine running! But there’s a another, more topically current reason…
A Skyhawk properly trimmed for straight and level flight (that means all the controls in the right position) wants to stay straight and level.
Let’s say a flock of birds appears in front of you and you pull up suddenly and accidentally stall the plane. Basically, that means that it starts to fall out of the sky. The nose points straight down and you’re in a dive headed for a rather abrupt landing.
With you and the nose looking straight down at the ground rushing up, your immediate reflex is to pull back on the yoke (or stick) to bring that aircraft nose back up. Unfortunately, if the plane is in a stall, pulling with all your might will do precisely nothing.
In fact, pilots are trained to do the exact opposite of what everything is screaming they should do. We force ourselves to push forward on the stick, restoring correct air flow over the wings and the horizontal stabilizer, and then pull out of the dive.
For sake of argument, let’s say you just can’t bring yourself to push forward when every part of your anatomy is screaming pull back, pull up? You know what? If you LET GO of all the controls, chances are the plane will right itself on its own and all by itself seeking to return to straight and level flight.
What does this have to do with anything? Often, when the economy is in free fall, legislators keep trying to pull back on the stick, to DO SOMETHING, when, in fact, were they to just let go, the economy would most likely right itself!
At another level, I’m talking about about control vs. freedom. The LEFT wants to control everything. For them, in their warped world view, if they have control over the sources of production as well as production itself it can be equitably divvied up among everyone. History proves that this communist/marxist/socialist approach to society results in the worst possible outcome (think Venezuela, North Korea, the U.S.S.R.).
In fact, letting go of the stick, i.e. giving more freedom to individuals, the Traditionalist approach to organizing society, results in growth and prosperity for EVERYONE. One of the great truisms is that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.
Reagan was dead on right…government is not the solution. Government is the PROBLEM! If we can just figure out a way to get government’s hands off the stick, the plane will right itself.
But then why would we need politicians?
