Originally Posted by
Judd
Some flying schools have jumped on the band-wagon by advertising for pilots to pay to undergo training on light aerobatic aircraft to experience the "G" forces that occur and which may cause disorientation. All this in visual conditions of course. Personally I doubt the value of this type of training since unusual attitude recovery training in jet transport aircraft has little in common with an inverted spin in a Pitts Special.
If you literally mean "inverted spin" then yeah, not much value in that for what one will encounter in an airliner. But in general? Then I disagree, as I think there is huge value in doing unusual attitudes in real life, starting with basic acro "on purpose" maneuvers leading up into surprise upset recoveries. From my years of teaching this stuff, one of my lasting impressions is that most people's logic and flying reactions are overwhelmed on their first exposure to extreme attitudes, and the correct reactions will not happen. Any notion of a memorized mental list of steps given in ground school "training," by itself, is about as worthless as expecting someone to takeoff and land an airplane from only a classroom description.
There is no substitute for putting someone in the actual airplane in the actual environment, working past the "awe" and the sensory overload, and learning how to do the maneuvers and procedures. And, in line with the building-block approach, basic aerobatic maneuvers should be introduced first so as to teach people how to think and act in the new environment with a lower-workload set of tasks. Once that is comfortable, only then can those skills be meaningfully taken to the task of maneuvering out of a surprise unusual attitude. It would be a ludicrous expectation that someone interpret their suddenly-established/revealed roll attitude, find the nearest horizon, resist the temptation to pull through the bottom, and roll toward that nearest horizon, without first being able to do a simple aileron roll that is known about ahead of time.
You also mention the need for an IMC approach to this, and I agree; but only in the sense that it's a further building block, and not that that's a
replacement for what I said earlier. What the instrument show you is a much narrower picture (literally) than what you see outside, but once you have interpreted what they're telling you, your next course of action is the same as what you (should have) learned to do in visual conditions. Of course, an EFIS screen gives you something closer to an outside picture than an old gyro.
You might also object that the much lighter control forces and greater reactions rates of an acro trainer are not representative of an airliner, but the advantages far outweigh these disadvantages. (I've always thought the best unusual attitude trainer is a Cessna 150 Aerobat... It's got a yoke instead of a stick like commercial airplane, and it's sluggish on the controls. If it could only have about 2 or 3 times the engine so it could climb!)