Fl1ingfrog wrote:
Briskly could, in the heat of the moment, be applied too much and tip the aircraft inverted. A pause could be anything in a high adrenaline moment and delay the recovery too long
Too true! I found my first spin a high adrenaline moment even with a highly experienced ex-CFS instructor beside me (Victa Airtourer, 1965). Of course I knew what was coming but it was still a shock when the aircraft seemed to stop in a gentle turn, lurched sideways and downwards and began spinning. Anyone without spin training has no chance, as seen a couple of years ago when an ex-airline captain with ten times my number of hours spun his C152 off a steep turn with fatal result. About that time, following a fatal stall-spin in a Tiger Moth, someone even suggested in this forum that Tiger Moth aircraft might be inherently dangerous ... too right they are, unless their pilots had been taught to recognise the incipient spin and of course to recover from it. Like Megan I found the TM a docile beast and a superb teacher, as was her successor the Chipmunk.
I remember that individual aircraft can also be different. Tiger Moth DP would recover from a developed spin in three-quarters of a turn, but IT needed seven-eighths. Maybe because DP was rigged to 4.5 degrees incidence, while IT was rigged to the minimum 4 degrees in the hope it would go faster (it didn't). Maybe because DP was built by DH in 1940, while IT was built by Morris Motors in 1941. Of course the old warhorse had so many bits and pieces that inconsistencies were inevitable, a tradition nobly followed by the Tucano according to the rueful engineers on the Mil Aviation forum.
Interesting that Canadian TMs had no strakes, maybe unnecessary because they had canopies over the fiendishly cold open cockpits, increasing the side area?