ORIGINAL: brett65
It's when the plane or the air going over and under the wing is not moving fast enough to provide lift and the plane just becomes a rock. Not a problem if you have enough altitude to get some speed back up, but at landing it would be imminent death. Tip stall from what I can tell is one side of the plane loosing lift and rolling off to that side.
Let me know If I'm right guys, I have been around planes and done about everything you can do except fly a real one myself.
OK, you want to know if you're right or not.
A stall is caused by too great an angle of attack. That's it. Nothing more. It can happen at high speed or low speed. But it only happens when the AOA is greater than it should be.
But you pegged what a tip stall is. It's exactly what you said,
"Tip stall from what I can tell is one side of the plane loosing lift and rolling off to that side. " Spot on.
Why one side only? Well, our models are almost never perfectly lined up. They're almost always "side slipping" or yawed. Full scale airplanes have instruments for the pilot to help him keep his airplane "straight". We don't have anything at all, and are strapped with the problem that we can't even see the very few degrees that are enough to cause problems. And we've got another problem with wind gusting. We for sure can't see the wind. And add the problem of wind direction and we're setup for the fall. Or our models are. How often does your model have the wind straight down the runway on it's landings? So almost every time our wings stall, one side is going to go before the other. And you're right. All of us will call it a "tip stall".