Originally Posted by
Centaurus
Jonkster is right. During my flying instructor course at RAAF Central Flying School in 1956, spinning in a Wirraway was part of the syllabus. The Wirraway was a dual control aircraft with the student flying from the front seat and the instructor in the rear seat. On this occasion I had to "patter" the spin from the back seat while the CFS instructor took the part of the student in the front seat. There was no specific minimum height for recovery.
From 5000 ft I pattered the spin to the student in the front seat and recovered by 3000 ft. Then the CFS instructor took the part of the student in the front seat and I handed over to him and told him to have a go at spinning.
He did a three turn spin but made no attempt to recover. I told him to recover but we kept spinning. By now we had gone through about seven turns of the spin and losing a lot of height. I called "Taking over" but found the controls apparently jammed. I repeated the call and the "student" replied he was frightened. This was not funny anymore and still I could not move the controls from the back seat. I lost my cool and shouted at the student "Let go of the bloody controls" which he did immediately and I recovered from the spin.
At the subsequent de-briefing back at base, the CFS instructor said that if a student has frozen on the controls in fear then don't be afraid to use lurid language to hopefully shock him into letting go of the controls.
In todays legal atmosphere I wonder if I could sue the RAAF for my trauma caused by their instructor pretend freezing on the controls. I would have Buckley's chance of winning of course and probably get scrubbed for trying..
If you had been traumatised by a demonstration that students sometimes to do unexpected and dangerous things requiring quick thinking and effective action on the instructor's part, perhaps you would not have met the criteria for the instructor qualification? Perhaps you would have scrubbed yourself?
Methinks that your long, safe, illustrious and enviable aviation career Centaurus is, in no small part, a consequence of you having 'the right stuff' to learn an important lesson that needed to be learnt rather than being traumatised by it.
(I recall a fighter pilot, who'll remain nameless, at a RAAF Squadron that will remain nameless, who scrubbed himself while I was there because he could no longer face the implications of air-air gunnery practise. As a callow youth at the time I thought it was selfish of him to have taken up a training slot for which many others, including me, would have given their right arm to occupy. Now that I'm old enough to be mature, I realise that his decision was a principled and courageous one.)