“Never bank over 30 degrees in the pattern,” and other lessons

I’ve read the description of your initial landing incident over and over, and your phrase “things got quiet” keeps jumping out at me. I realize it’s been nearly 50 years, but this doesn’t sound like the description of an incipient stall. It sounds more like an incipient power loss. Maybe carb ice, maybe fuel starvation.

Fuel tank management can be a tricky business in low wing aircraft – you get to use left or right tank, but not both. The usual rule of thumb is to use the fullest tank for landing, but when there’s a crosswind, gravity comes into play on final. Remember that the bottom of the tank slopes toward the airplane, and fuel feeds from the inboard end of the tank. If you’re landing with a left crosswind, your left wing is down, so the fuel sloshes away from the left side pickup. If the tank is low you can end up pulling air. Better to use the right tank as long as there’s adequate fuel left.

But now think about what could happen on the base to final turn. You find yourself overshooting the center line, and, minding the “don’t bank more than 30 degrees in the pattern” rule, you bank modestly but step hard on the left pedal. The airplane skids, the fuel in the right tank sloshes to the right, exposing the pickup, and things get real quiet. It’s more important to keep the turn coordinated than to limit to a particular bank angle.

As long as you haven’t allowed to get way too slow in the pattern, you have plenty of lift reserve. A Cherokee 140 at max gross stalls at a bit under 60 mph, clean. Lift goes with the square of the airspeed, so at the recommended 80 mph pattern speed, you have an available load factor of 1.77. More if you have some flaps down. A 30 degree bank takes a load factor of 1.15; 45 degrees takes 1.4. Even if you’re down to 70 mph the available load factor is 1.36 or more.

There’s another, more important, reason to keep the base to final turn coordinated. The skid from trying to do that flat turn can kick you into a snap roll, and/or, if you’re too slow, give you a cross-controlled stall which quickly becomes a spin. Both are a bad idea at pattern altitude.

The 30 degree bank angle limit is only half the answer, and treating it as a rule by itself can be a deadly trap. While not making steep turns in the pattern is always a good idea, the more important rule is to keep your turns coordinated and not try to cheat on a bank angle limit with the rudder. The laws of physics do not tolerate cheating.

– Andy

With over 100 years of experience by humans trying to emulate the skills of nature’s natural aviators, the birds, I find it disheartening that CFIs, courtesy of CFR part 91, still try to make pilots believe that angle of bank becomes dangerous at the magic 30 degrees. I sincerely believe that the FAA is at fault in many of these turn to final stall accidents due to their scaring these aviators into believing such BS, thus causing the pilot to enter the panic mode, uncoordinated flight and subsequently exceeding critical angle of attack. The 30 degree angle of bank rule is wrong, dead wrong. It teaches CFIs and student pilots to fear the airplane instead of learning to fly it. It teaches that numbers on an instrument panel and rules in the FARs keep aircraft aloft. They do not. They are only tools. I was trained to fly supersonic aircraft with tiny wings landing at nearly 200 mph close to 50 years ago. I confess, however, that I really learned to fly (after my six years in the USAF) as a “duster pilot.” In my 8 years flying these bi-planes in Texas rice country, I didn’t once see a functioning airspeed indicator or any other flight instrument, for that matter. Why didn’t I crash? I was making turns to final about once every minute all day long at an altitude of maybe 100 feet AGL with most turns at angles of bank exceeding 45 degrees once the max gross weight dropped a bit with the payload decreasing. In the late 1990’s when the A-320 was fairly new, they told us we were being upgraded from pilots to Flight Systems Managers. I’m retired now, but they seem to be changing their minds now about being a manager instead of a pilot. There is no doubt that an airplane can be taken from point A to point B for an entire career by following the rules and the numbers. But stuff happens, and when it does, being able to fly your way out of it can be a good thing. Climb up to altitude with someone qualified to help you, cover up the flight instruments and learn the difference between attitude (pitch & roll) and angle of attack. If you learn to fly by angle of attack, you will be a better and safer VFR pilot (hint- no AOA indicator needed on the panel). Keep those wings flying. Only angle of attack does that.