Stick and Rudder Skills for Modern Pilots with Rich Stowell

By John Zimmerman
Jun 16, 2026
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Pilot's Discretion Podcast, episode 132

Master flight instructor Rich Stowell says manual flying skills and decision-making skills are complementary, but they’re often presented as an either/or choice. The spin master explains why that’s wrong and illustrates it with his “power-push-roll” recovery for spiral dives, an overlooked threat in aviation. He also shares a new way to train pilots, which he calls “learn-do-fly,” emphasizing the importance of teaching at the correlation level. In the Ready to Copy segment, Rich talks about the biggest mistake CFIs make during stall training, tips for hand-propping vintage airplanes, and what martial arts taught him about flying.

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Quotes:

Why manual flying skills support mental skills: “the more time we can spend focusing on decision making, because we have a good foundation in stick and rudder skills, we'll make better decisions.”
Recovering from a spiral dive: “the big part of it is to push forward a little bit—even though we might be pointing at the ground.”
The an overlooked step during a recovery: “unstall the brain stall”
The importance of training: “I have never seen anyone accidentally do the right thing when they're startled or in some kind of an unusual attitude. You have to think your way through it.”
Why bad instruction has long-term consequences: “what is their incentive now to do proficiency training? Because they don't want to go through that process again.”
What it means to teach at the correlation level: “[it] means that we are creating pilots who are capable of thinking their way through scenarios that they may not have ever seen before.”
The real goal for instructors: “we shouldn't be training pilots to pass a check ride. We should be training them for the rest of their flying career. The check ride is an event.”
Upset training: “no matter how good we think we are, we don't know until we're in the environment. And that's the importance of the training—it takes the novelty off of it.”
Delivering higher quality instruction: “I don't think anything that I'm advocating (or others like me) takes more time. It just takes more focus.”
Aerobatics: “It's fun with a purpose.”
Staying curious as a CFI: “as an instructor, it's good to be a student again and do something that's totally different.”