Part of my education was flight training. A skill that I dreaded practicing was the takeoff and departure stall. To perform one, you climb to a safe altitude and simulate a takeoff: advance the throttle to full power, and pull the nose up. With enough pitch up, the aircraft eventually begins to lose airspeed, even at full power.

If you continue slowing down, the aircraft will vibrate in a peculiar way (called buffeting), and the stall warning horn will progress from a faint vocal-fry ehhhhh to a full-on operatic AHHHHH. If you keep pulling up with the wings level, then the nose will pitch down, and the plane will resume flying. That’s a stall. If your wings are not level, then the aircraft will flip over and spiral nose-down toward the ground. That’s a spin.

You never forget how a spin looks in your windshield. If you’re an acrobat (and your plane is certified for acrobatics), I’m sure it’s a fun sensation. I didn’t ever get to where I enjoyed it. Anyway, a Cessna 150 in a spin will remain in a spin until either the pilot recovers from it, or the aircraft encounters the ground, whichever comes first.

Part of flight training is the periodic checkride. A checkride is a check pilot who’s not your regular instructor brings a clipboard along on a flight with you and evaluates how you’re doing.

My first checkride was going pretty well. Preflight inspection went fine. Radio work, takeoff, S-turns, turns about a point, …basic airmanship stuff all went fine. I knew, though, that takeoff & departure stalls were coming up soon on that clipboard. Ugh.

And finally there it was.

So here we go: climb to a safe altitude, level off, deep breath. Ok, full throttle. Now nose up. Airspeed decaying. Keep pulling, more nose up. There it is, the soft ehhhhh and the buffeting. Nose dips gently and releases back into normal flight attitude, we keep flying. Dang it, I pitched down too soon, before the snap. It was barely even a stall at all—I’ll have to do it again. So I did another one. Same thing. Crap, so a third. Same thing. Dammit.

I was suffering. I didn’t know what to do. I was going to flunk my check ride because I kept chickening out. No snap, no spin, nothing. I looked over at my check pilot. He said, “Wow, you must really love takeoff and departure stalls.”

I said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t get a good one for you.”

He looked confused: “What are you talking about, you just did three that were perfect.”

I had no idea. I thought I was one step short.

We talked for a minute. I said I thought the goal was to induce a spin so I could demonstrate a spin recovery. He said, “Oh God-no. What?! No, we’re training you how to detect an early stall condition and recover from it before it ever develops into something that might get you killed.”

Oh.

Lesson: Understand the goal. Too much can be as bad as not enough.