Flight below stall speed?

  • Has anyone else noticed that on landing flare, FS2 aircraft can still generate lift well below the white line stall speed? I've been well below stall speed and still floating

    From my real life flying - I know sometimes ground effect may cause the stall speed to drop a knot or two but not the 10-12 knots below stall I've been seeing.

    Just curios if anyone else has seen this.....

    • Official Post

    Stall speed is an artificial speed that just happens to be indicated on your airspeed indicator when your aircraft stalls. Stalling physically just means your angle of attack is too high and airflow separates from the wing, so you can always fly below the stall speed mark on your airspeed indicator (if you keep the angle of attack low), you just can't maintain a constant altitude while you do that (the total lift is not enough to counter the weight force). But you are not stalled, you are just flying slower than the speed they call stall speed for unaccelerated, level flight out of ground effect, sometimes with power on, sometimes with power off (depends on what they used)... :D

    Stall speed can decrease up to zero when you fly a parabola (fall like a rock) and stall speed rises with the square root of the mass and load factor.... Stall speed decreases when you have propeller wash that adds to the lift and it also decreases when your engines/propellers thrust have an upward component, e.g. stall speed could be lower if you fly straight up vertically cause the thrust takes counters some of the weight force.

    So stall speed on the airspeed indicator is not a good way to measure if an aircraft is actually stalled and its totally possible to fly below stall speed under certain conditions.

    Near ground effect the lift usually increases when the airfoils is upright; in the real world and in Aerofly. There are actually real world aircraft that can only fly in ground effect (large flying boats)... It depends on the configuration of the aircraft how much the stall speed actually drops, low wing aircraft tend to squeeze the air better so their ground effect is stronger.

  • Try using the HUD or an aeroplane with an angle of attack guage. With flaps up see if it stalls at about 15 degrees angle of attack. Look at the AoA guage or the difference between the HUD's aeroplane pitch and flight path vector symbols. Lightly loaded planes can fly at amazingly low speeds compared to flying at normal weights.