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Every one of them who challenged it claimed that a center of gravity 12 feet behind the center of lift would almost instantly force the aircraft into a stall condition. The designed parameters of the plane require the center of gravity to always be several feet ahead of the center of lift to maintain stability.

My A&P school chief instructor was retired from Braniff Airlines, where he had held Braniff company ID card #3, having been hired by the Braniff brothers to maintain their aircraft before hiring any contract pilots or company administrative staff. He stayed on after the brothers' deaths in 1954, served as Braniff's Chief of Maintenance and retired as Maintenance Director at Dallas Love Field, following the 1970 Braniff acquisition of N601BN [AKA *Fat Albert* or *The Great Pumpkin*] the first 747 placed in the company's service [more formally known as *747 Braniff Place* to company ad writers] Nib's knowledge of the maintenance and flight characteristics of the 747-127 was beyond enclycopediac, and when I saw the CIA-produced animation of the Flight 800 disaster, I made a video tape and showed it to him. *Nope,* says he. *If the nose had come off, it would have stalled and dropped like a brick. It wasn't an airplane any more.*

BTW: when a 747 is fully pressurized, the weight of just the air aboard is over a ton. Think about what having a ton of your aircraft load go flying out the front end does to your aircraft stability.

It stalled, tail down, and dropped like a 365-ton rock.

*Nope,* says he. *If the nose had come off, it would have stalled and dropped like a brick. It wasn't an airplane any more.*

That is just what I have been trying to tell Moonman62. . . It would have fallen like a brick which had been doing 358 knots. . . In a ballistic fall, which all the empirical evidence shows it did.

I took flying lessons in high school in the late 1970s and I still remember my first instructor teaching me about stalls.

Not all that much to fear in a PA28-140, but not all airplanes are quite so forgiving.

He said his brother was a DC-9 captain and said you wanted to avoid stalling that one.

IIRC, it was something about the T-tail and its not having much "extra" power being a bad combination, that it couldn't power its way out of a deep stall and down it would go in a tail slide/tail spin. Not a thing you could do.

I don't know if that's true or not or just my instructor's way to re-tune my teenage invincibility, but I'm pretty sure that when a wing stalls it doesn't go up.

Unless some force changes the math, gravity wins and it comes down.

I'm told that it has something to do with verifiable and repeatable science, but that's probably just a theory.