Beware of what many of us consider docile training aircraft, they do have a sting in there tail. I have done a lot of aerobatics and spinning in Tiger Moths - having also attended the NZ Tiger Moth Club spin Awareness Training a number of years ago. Recently i was judging an aerobatic competition in a C152. After a number of rotations i told the competitor to recover, nothing happened, i said recover now to which he replied i am and its not doing anything.
By this time we were getting much lower than what i was comfortable with and said I have control. He was right, I put in the standard recovery technique and the C152 just continued on spinning. I cant describe the overwhelming hopeless feeling in the pit of your stomach you experience when after putting in the std recovery nothing happens and the earth is getting very close very fast, not something I ever want to experience ever again.... As we descended through 1000ft I thought thats it we are history, eventually I managed to get it to recover, we were only one more revolution and 1-2 seconds from being a smoking hole in the ground. When it did recover the nose attitude was much flatter to what I am used too, which may have been a blessing as we had to climb back up to 500ft to join for landing. I have spoken to many learned collegues since in an attempt to discover what went wrong. The opinons have been many and varied. One advised let go of everything and it will recover by itself. I have it on very good authority from a very experienced C152 A cat that if it goes flat and you let go of everything, it will not recover itself. Another advised a burst of power to blow some slipstream over the blanketed controls, another advised using the flaps to alter its attitude. It was a very sobering event not only for myself and the competitor but also for the many that saw us dissappear behind a row of trees waiting for the inevitable