Originally Posted by
jonkster
From your post you indicate you are getting back into flying. Have you had a previous experience flying that scared you? (spin training? stalling? aerobatics etc?).
If there is an area in operating the aircraft in which you feel decidedly uncomfortable it may need to be dealt with gently and with some time and exposure until you can move beyond it.
How do you feel when practicing stalling? If you are unhappy there perhaps spinning should wait a bit longer until you feel confident stalling? That is no big deal. Practicing stalling (on a gentle progression of aggressiveness) helps make for good landing skills as you get used to slow speed flight and control so it is not wasted time.
Humans are not as rational as we would like to believe. Fear can be overcome by appropriate increasing exposure that doesn't put you into a strong "out of control" (figuratively not literally) feeling.
You may know rationally the wings won't be damaged when spinning. That won't necessarily stop your thoughts unless you have become emotionally confident they won't.
That all said, having a constant (but well mastered) apprehension about what things can go wrong (and correspondingly working to mitigate those risks) makes for a good attitude to flying. And a good attitude to preflight inspections
I've always been nervous in planes, but 2 main things happened a while ago that really rattled me a bit. I was flying with a friend (I was just a passenger) and we had a super close call with another airplane. The bigger event was with a CFI on my first flight after soloing (I had just switched to him after soloing because my original instructor wasn't teaching any longer) with my friend in the back seat. I had trouble trusting instructors throughout my training, so I was trying to make a point to get over that and trust them which is what enabled this situation to go downhill.
During runup the vacuum pump was dead and the attitude indicator was flopped over (although I recall the HSI being functional somehow). The weather wasn't great that day. I'm pretty sure it was VFR on takeoff, but there were lots of huge thick clouds with gaps between them. I asked if it was still safe to fly, he said it was, and he was an instrument instructor, so I had no reason to doubt him. Anyway, we took off and were just cruising around between clouds, and the instructor said we could do instrument approaches at a nearby airport. I again asked if it was safe to do, and he said it was.
He talked to ATC and they vectored us towards some gigantic clouds. I was a little bit nervous because we didn't have an attitude indicator, so I pointed out the clouds to him and he said it was fine because we had our VSI and TC. Anyways, we go into IMC, and all is well, and we are just doing what ATC says. Eventually, he gave the controls to me and gave me a basic rundown on flying partial panel, and watched me for a bit while I turned to the heading the ATC said to, and then he went to fidgeting with his iPad and ForeFlight or whatnot.
One big problem is that I had done literally thousands of hours of (personal, not certified) simulator flying when I was young (all I wanted to do when I got old enough was to fly, so I spent all my christmas money, birthday money, etc, on simulator equipment and software). The TC in my flight simulator (X-Plane) would indicate the rate of turn until the little airplane on the TC was nearly vertical in each direction. This did not mirror reality where there are apparently bumpers/stops only a few millimeters after the standard rate turn markings.
Anyways, I saw that the TC was past the standard rate turn markings, but I didn't really care all that much because I was maintaining altitude, and I didn't care a ton if the turn was slightly faster than standard rate. Well, I was keeping aileron input in because that was what appeared to be holding the rate of turn in (when in reality it was just jammed against the stop), so the plane kept rolling further and further which I was completely unaware of.
I saw that the vertical speed was starting to move down past like -500fpm and so I pulled back a bit and looked over at my turn coordinator again and focused on that for a bit, and then I guess the instructor looked up from his iPad and he saw the vertical speed and immediately took control, which prompted me to look back at the vertical speed which was way in the negative. He pulled back and the vertical speed moved back to like -300fpm before dropping back down again right away, so he pulled back harder, and it moved back to like +100fpm or something before dropping back down again. He pulled even harder the next time and for longer, and then the stall horn went off so he pushed forward, and I think we stabilized out some time after that.
At some point, I stopped looking at the vertical speed and looked at the GPS and some other instruments, but I don't recall a ton after that. At some point through, he had started talking with ATC, and some time after we leveled off (still in IMC, but headed away from the mountains at least), the ATC asked about souls and fuel, which was disconcerting to hear. We ended up getting out of the clouds, and he asked if I wanted to take control, but I didn't. After that, my friend threw up in the back seat, and I was trying to get him to not feel bad about it.
We landed and I told the instructor I was going to call my parents to come pick me and my friend up, and he didn't want me to. I called anyways, and my parents knew that flying scared me a lot, so they thought I was just over-reacting and so they didn't want to drive like 2-3 hours to get me, so I got stuck flying back. On the flight back, the instructor wanted me to sit in the right seat so he could sit in the left.
At this point, the weather was a lot worse, it was starting to rain, and there were only a few points where the ridge line didn't go into the clouds, so he wanted to go right away. We ended up flying back, and we threaded the needle between the lowest parts of the ridge line and the cloud bottoms, and stayed right below the clouds all the way back (I think we were at pattern altitude or close to that). The rain and visibility was so bad that I couldn't figure out where we were or where the airport was, even after flying in that same area for like 45 hours.
Anyways, we landed and parked, and I drove my friend home. I do remember thinking during the drive that it was not even a good day to drive because of how windy and rainy it was, and how hard it was to see. I stopped flying for a long time, and I was his last (or one of) student before he quit flying and flight instruction entirely.
I don't really know why I put the whole story out there, but maybe it will help someone else so they can learn from my mistakes. I still get super anxious when I go through the story or talk about it, but I think it's one of the main reasons why I hate G-Forces and don't trust airplanes at all.
regards,
ASweetOldMan