Originally Posted by
capngrog
As pointed out in Post #4, I was taught in primary flight training to use opposite rudder and some nose down elevator to recover from a spin and to leave the ailerons alone.
So was I, but "stick fully forward" rather than "some nose down elevator". (With the Chipmunk, the number of fatal failed spin recoveries led to trials in the '60s which found that an aerodynamic lock misled pilots into thinking that the stick was fully forward when it wasn't, leading to the spin flattening and becoming unrecoverable. In the words of one of the pilots involved (much later, out of uniform and our Chief Pilot) you needed to "get your boot behind the stick and shove it fully forward", with full opposite rudder as usual. As I recall, spin strakes were then fitted which alleviated the problem.
With a Prentice, on the other hand, I found out by accident that spin strakes achieved little.
My Dad was nearly killed when instructing in Harvards (1941) when a flat spin developed and the aircraft hit the ground in an absolutely flat attitude, still spinning. The student in the front seat died. Dad walked away. 2 years later the Lanc III he was flying back from Munich with no bombs left and half-empty fuel tanks was attacked by a fighter and severely damaged, set on fire, fell into a spin and exploded (ie the fuel tanks exploded) at about 6,000ft. He survived that one, too. Funny old world, isn't it?