(Pace): I have no problem with avoidance training but being a realist realise that with the best will in the world accidents happen when the pilot is distracted or panicky.
Agreed, but IMHO that applies to racers and their pilot equivalents, too. Might not be representative, but two scenes witnessed as a spectator spring to my mind: 1) accident at a sports car race behind a "blind" bend, following driver slams on the brakes and slides straight into one of the involved cars; 2) supermoto race, one driver tumbles, the following one locks up his frontwheel in panic and falls as well. In both cases, theoretically the accidents could have been avoided by "correct" maneuvers and in both cases, the drivers surely had excellent wheel'n pedal/bar'n lever skills, but that didn't help against a panic reaction.
Similarly, I believe that even for the best stick'n rudder ace with lots of controlled stall/spin/spiral dive recoveries under his belt chances are that an
inadvertent and
surprising stall/spin will result in a startled "WTF?!?
" and a wrong "panic" reaction, at least initially. So while I agree that getting to experience spins etc. first-hand with an appropriate instructor in an appropriate aircraft at appropriate altitude is a valuable experience (and might take away the "awe of the unknown"; it did for me), I doubt it makes even partly immune against panic let alone distraction. IMHO, at least for the much-cited turn-to-finals accident and similar scenarios, judgment and situation awareness beat Stroker Ace reflexes and Top Gun aircraft handling skills any time.