"The plane crashed when the engine stalled"

The newspaper report was crystal clear: "The plane crashed in the field when the engine stalled." The accompanying photograph is also clear: a small plane, totally intact, sitting in a field with no apparent damage.

99.8% of the people in the US will never learn to fly a plane. (That's right: only 2 people out of each 1,000 are pilots.) So it's not surprising that aviation knowledge isn't widespread but it would be nice if the press could get at least the basics right. Unfortunately, they seldom do.

The statement quoted in the first sentence above has two basic errors: the plane sitting in a field evidently didn't crash. Instead, the pilot made a safe landing in an off-airport field. Sometimes emergency landings do result in crashes, especially when there's no suitable place to land. But most off-airport landings result in little damage to the airplane or injury to the occupants.

The biggest error, though, and the one that grates on the nerves of pilots is "when the engine stalled." The engine in a plane might stop running and we'd say it stalled if it was in a car. In a plane, we don't because the word 'stall' has an entirely different meaning when it comes to planes. In a plane, the wing stalls, not the engine. The wing stalls when it can't develop enough lift anymore. The simplest way to think about it is to think of the nose of the plane pointing too high in the sky for the wings to keep generating enough lift to keep the plane up.

What happens when the wing stalls? Usually not much: the plane will lose a little altitude (maybe 50 feet), the pilot pushes the yoke forward, the stall is broken and the plane flies normally again. Pilots are trained to do this and practice stalls. And, oh yeah, what happens when the engine stops?

The pilot lands the plane. :-) We're trained to do that, too.