When you train to fly an airplane, you naturally focus on how to maintain safe flight. However, the idea that maintaining safe flight can be predicated on safe flight practices is a dangerous philosophy. While knowing your aircraft backwards and forwards will certainly aid you in avoiding unusual attitudes and uncontrolled flight, there are a variety of situations that can cause aircraft to assume an unusual attitude or experience uncontrolled flight that are beyond pilots' control, such as sudden weather changes and mechanical failure. In such instances, simply knowing how to fly an airplane in a normal context won't do you any good. To resume a usual attitude or regain controlled flight, you have to know the techniques for recovering from unusual attitudes and uncontrolled flight, and that's where upset recovery training comes in.

At most US flight schools, pilots are taught how to avoid stalls and spins by practicing correct flying procedures, but rarely are they taught what to do when stalls and spins occur, which greatly increases their chances of experiencing fatal ground impact in the event of a stall and the spin that it soon produces. A real world example of this fact occurred on February 18, 2009, when a Colgan airliner crashed near Buffalo. As the plane prepared for landing, it experienced a stall upon landing approach. But instead of decreasing the plane's angle of attack and canceling the stall, the pilots actually pushed through the plane's stall warning system's automated attempt to cancel the stall, resulting in a crash that killed 50 people.

In order to avoid these situations, pilots have to receive a thorough course in airplane upset recovery training, and they usually have to turn to an advanced flight school to receive the training, such as aerobatic training schools that instruct professional pilots in flight safety disciplines, including as stall spin awareness, instrument recovery, aerobatic flight and basic and advanced upset recovery procedures. While many flight schools offer technical training in upset recovery, they typically offer it in a classroom setting instead of requiring students to demonstrate upset recovery techniques during flight or even within the context of a full flight simulator. What results is a large number of pilots that are prone to react to a stall, spin, unusual attitude, etc. the way that the pilots of the Colgan airliner did: instinctively and amateurishly.

In the months following the Colgan airliner crash, much blame has been placed on the aircraft's pilots and the airline that hired them without realizing that one of the pilots had failed three piloting tests. However, US flight training schools deserve some of the blame as well. After all, they produce pilots who soon forget the upset recovery technique information that they held in their short-term memory for the sake of passing written exams. If you attend or attended a flight school that rewards short-term memorization instead of focusing on testing flight knowledge during flight, you owe it to yourself and those who fly with you to receive upset recovery training at an advanced flight school.