Originally Posted by
possel
It also still annoys me that the first aircraft lost was due to runaway trim at high speed, and a certain Wg Cdr had previously refused my suggestion to put a note in the Aircrew Manual (Topic 15?) recommending to reduce speed at once if that occurred, on the grounds that "every pilot knows that"!
If I may make a slight correction, it was actually an inadvertent full nose down trim application during an inverted spin and not a trim runaway at high speed (I did the ADR analysis for the BOI). The aircraft was recovered from the spin but was not pulled out of the dive. It bunted to the inverted at which point the crew rolled erect and it bunted down again; they ejected on about the down vertical at, from memory, about 380 KIAS.
I once made the same inadvertent trim input during the CA Release trials and I wrote it up saying that ".. if it happened in service it would not be a problem as you would notice the higher pull force during the dive pull out and all you had to do was to retrim nose up". How wrong I was! We continued to see it happening occasionally during inverted spins and it became a big pre-flight briefing point.