To start with, the best way of dealing with spins and stalls, is to avoid
them in the first place. Although this may sound like an impossibility
at first, with a little practice it is entirely possible. Don't disable
the stalls and spins on the menu, because they are a huge part of aerial
combat, and if you want to play EAW to it's maximum, it is a simple skill
that you will have to master. As Markshot has indicated in his STK,
it is a moral victory if you can push your opponent to the edge and make
him enter a spin, because it simply shows your superiority - that you are
in complete control of your machine, and you have pushed your opponent
past the limits of his capabilities. In online EAW play, many victories
can be racked up when the fight gets down to ground level, and the Pilot
who know the least about spin/stall evasion usually finds himself augering
into the dirt. This is as good as any guns kill!
The best way to evade stalls and spins is to KNOW YOUR AIRCRAFT!
Take notice of things like what the best turning speeds are, where you
get the tightest turn, the quickest rate of turn, how far you can pull
back on the stick without stalling at various speeds, perfecting your joystick
calibration, how well your aircraft responds to rudder, and what is the
minimum altitude you need to get out of a spin. Get to know your
aircraft intimately, and once you have mastered it, then learn the same
things about the other aircraft.
There are five main indicators that alert you to the fact that you are
nearing a stall or a spin. These are : -
1. The colour cues on the airspeed display.
2. A shuddering sound which indicates stalling airflow.
3. Your rate of turn and decreases and controls become sluggish.
4. Your wing begins drop in the direction that you are turning.
5. Your world is spinning around you, and it is too late!!
I will go through all of these conditions with some basic explanations.
1. The colour cues on the airspeed
display.
These
are pretty simple to interpret. If you have the Flight information
enabled, (ALT F) you will always have three bits of information displayed
in the bottom left corner of your screen. This information is very
handy and you should find yourself looking at it quite often. The
display gives you your instantaneous SPEED, ALTITUDE, and HEADING.
The SPEED display will usually be in green,
which indicates that your wings have a stable airflow, - no problem!
If it turns Yellow,
you are close to the Critical AOA. You will notice that you can hold
a turn with the yellow indicator on without the sound cues starting.
Turn a little bit harder, and the stall sound starts to play. At
this stage you are turning nearly as hard as is possible - you can continue
turning like this if you keep your airspeed up and don't increase the AOA,
but remember that any more wrong moves will throw you into the final
colour.
If the display turns Red,
airflow has stalled on one wing, and you have entered a spin. At
this stage the stall sound cues will still be playing flat out, and you
will lose the padlocked view on your enemy. You probably won't notice
too much of this, because the world will be rapidly spinning around you,
and you will have other things to worry about! Here are a few screenshots
of the three stages using EAW V1.2b
Note
that the altitude display also changes colours, Green = greater than 150
M (500 ft), Yellow = 150 M (500 ft) to 30 M (100 ft), and Red = less than
30 M (100 ft). For some reason, EAW changes flight characteristics
when you change between these levels, and it is quite noticeable in landings
at slow speeds. When you pass through 30m (100 ft), lift drops right
off, and your attittude changes. If you are going slow enough, you
can enter a spin without warning, and at 30m (100 ft), this is always fatal!
If anyone has any clues on that, feel free to let me in on why.
2. A shuddering sound which indicates stalling airflow.
This
sound plays when your airspeed turns yellow or red, and stops when it turns
green. The standard EAW sound is that of stalling airflow going past
the wings. You should be able to pick this up quite easily in flight,
but for those who need a bit more magnification to read the signs, SAFEHAVEN
has made a new stall alarm sound, which has an audible beep-beep as well
as the stalling airflow sound (snd0055.snd). I found this a while
back and it comes highly reccomended by me. Don't leave the hanger
without it!! I have included this new sound in the package, and if
you unzipped this tutorial into your EAW folder, it should be there already.
If you are using stab, skins n more or theme manager, you may want to unzip
this to wherever your soundfiles belong. Many thanks to SAFEHAVEN
for making this little gem, and for allowing me to distribute it with this
tutorial.
4. Your wing begins to drop in the
direction that you are turning.
For
the reasons stated in the previous page, you will find this compounding
until you fix it, or until you enter a spin. One wing goes faster
than the other creating a lift differential and a dropping wing,
Airflow
is shaded as you yaw to one side, creating less airflow, a lift differential
and a dropping wing.
These
thing tend to compound themselves until the AOA exceeds critical, and you
enter a spin. Note that lifting a dropping wing only fixes a symptom
of spins, it doesn't cure the problem, and if your ailerons have gone mushy,
you won't have much control to do this anyway.
3. Your controls become sluggish and
your rate of turn decreases.
As the
AOA loads up and reaches critical, the airflow over your wing is already
becoming disturbed, and this has a marked effect on lift and your aileron
controls. They no longer respond as crisply as they used to, and when you
use full sideways movement of the stick to stop a wing from dropping, it
takes a long time to do the job. The last warning you get is that
your turn rate rapidly decreases. The nose stops pulling up, and
you have fractions of a second before the final stage sets in.
5. Your world is spinning, and it's
too late!!
Well,
there's not much to say here, other than that you should have been more
carefull a few seconds ago! Never mind though, because spin recovery
is really a piece of cake, and you'll soon get the hang of it in no time.
Time to proceed on the the next section to unlock the keys to spin recovery!
The section after will deal with avoiding spins.
Click here to go to Spin Recovery
Click here to go back to the Main Page