Posted for "terrence o'neill" <troneill@charter.net>:

stall stripsA comment on stalls:
Aircraft don't stall at a 'speed'.  They stall at an AOA.  Ask any wind tunnel guy.  ANY wing can be stalled at any airspeed from zero up to V a... where things might start to bend and take a set.
I reviewed about 800 NTSB accidents, just those involving a fatality, and found that about a third result from un intentiuonal stalls, usually from situations where the pilot had to fly his wing near it's (fixed) AOA, and couldn't SEE how close he was to the wing's stall AOA, and lost it.
I've been flying with an AOA vane on my experimentals since 1964 when testing the tail-prop Aristocraft.  I put them in my field fo vision for landing, and don;t have to worry about steep turns, weight, Gs or turbulence. My friend Marty Haedtler, a Bell P-400 survivor of the South Pacific, called it a 'bacon saver'.   I just watch the little vane and keep it a few degrees below the stall AOA. I had 'em on my tal-prop  Waco AristoCraft, a Cessna 152, my Model W, my Magnum, my V8 Pickup bush-plane, my Mitchell B-10, and had two on our Drtagonfly Mk II.  Others have installed them on 130 other plane -- ultralights, a Yankee, Zlin, Aeronca, Pulsar, Pitts, Zenith, Stinson, Cessda and Piper singles.  It's just a vane mounted on the wing, with no readout inside.  Shows you the an gle of the air coming to your wing.  After four years flying in the Navy when I put an AOA on I began learning a lot about flying.
I make 'em as a philanthropic hobby, but safety's not as salable as performance.  Jim Frantz's AOA is much more sophisticated and you can have your read-out on the panel, but his costs a little more.   : )
T.O