Stall resistance, or a very benign stall is one of the hallmark traits of a good trainer and the flat bottom airfoil excels here. This allows the plane to be recovered if the student does stall it on final approach or just after take-off.

I recently demonstrated to a student how resistant to a stall his NextStar is, and how easy it is to recover. I had him doing stalls, then just hold full up elevator and all the plane did was bobble – while being fully controllable in roll to the point I was able to do a 360 deg. turn with it stalled. After that I performed a maximum performance departure entering into a full power stall at 100' or so. The plane just mushed and immediately recovered as soon as I let off just a bit of the full up elevator I was holding.

There have been a couple of situations he’s gotten into (mostly on take-off) that if we would have been flying something other than a flat bottom trainer he would also be learning the art of aircraft repair – but that’s part of training, learning from your mistakes. Same for landing – there have been a couple of situations that flat bottom airfoil has really paid off.

Hogflyer