My Toyota turn signal got stuck returning to its neutral position and made a sound that is the same as the stall warning indicator on the Piper Archers that I fly. What a shock.
To understand why this was a shock first requires an understanding of why an airplane falls out of the sky. When the wings are not moving fast enough relative to the air they are passing through, the plane falls. Fast enough relates to the size of the wings, the angle the wings are moving through the air (picture your hand outside a car window at 60 mph) and the weight of the plane. On most single engine planes, before the plane is about to fall out of the air you hear a signal called the stall warning indicator.
The word stall is wrong. An engine on a car can stall and the car stands still or glides to a stop. An airplane can stall with the engine running smoothly but the plane will drop out of the air. For an airplane the word should be fall not stall. Fall is what happens when the plane stalls.
So when my car turn signal made the same sound as I would hear in an airplane when I was about to fall, created panic. In a plane I know what to do (accelerate by increasing power, pushing the nose down or both) in the car there is nothing comparable to do. I did what I had to do…convince myself that the sound was the same but the meaning of the sound wasn’t.