Jim,

You hit the nail on the head in paragraph three then
confused yourself! As you climb your Stall TAS increases
however VNE TAS doesnt. So they will run into each
other at very high altitudes or at least give you a
very small airspeed envelope to operate in. It is
this fact that you have to remember. Always think
in TAS and you cant go far wrong. IAS is only a value
that we see and unless you convert it accordingly to
TAS at altitude you may as well forget it.

At 18:00 16 December 2003, Jim wrote:
Still thinking about VNE and whether it is usually
stated as a TAS
rather than an IAS (one must read the POH to be sure,
of course).

I've gotten the notion, probably from comments I've
not understood
very well, that the 'coffin corner' is the intersection
of stall speed
as an IAS indication on the airspeed indicator, and
VNE understood as
a TAS and thus occurs at a decreasing IAS with altitude.

I guess the consequence of this notion is that as aircraft
altitude
goes up the stall speed TAS goes up to ultimately bump
into
the VNE TAS. If VNE is published as an IAS, like stall
speed,
then stall speed and VNE would never converge.

Or maybe it was the Manuevering TAS that
could bump into the VNE TAS.

IS this what is sometimes referred to as the 'coffin
corner'?