Cirrus 22 Crash - 1 Dead. Crisis.

[Confabulous]

it's one of the great holy grails of aerodynamics so far as I'm personally concerned.

True enough, it's fascinating even for a distinct non-expert like me. At least one wing not quite stalled, not quite flying, pitching, rolling and yawing simultaneously - can't simulate it properly either (yet). It's one of the few unknowns left in aerodynamics.

And it's fun too! With all the usual caveats applying.

Incidentally, with anyone see the motorglider version of the Ban-bi with those strange end plates with 3 tiny wings stacked one above the other? Apparently it acts as though it doubles the span of the wings - I couldn't find a link to it but it really looks weird, I just wonder how it works... simulated ground effect? Vortex reduction?

[Genghis the Engineer]

The actual spin is reasonably well modelled, I can point you at a few papers on the subject - Yangos and Yangos' paper "Spin: angles and inertial moments" being probably the best. But the recovery now, there's a thing.

I had a go at doing something myself a few years ago, problem is that control power becomes nonlinear at low speeds, which forces you into doing some experimental work. However at that point, there are some obvious and very good reasons not to go applying large control inputs close to the stall, which is what you need to do to try and develop a meaningful model.

The solution is probably to start doing this with a known spinnable aeroplane, better still a few different types, and start building up some data, accepting that you'll enter a few inadvertent spins in the process. The problem is that the time, resources and safety planning behind such a project would be considerable and so-far nobody's been prepared to let me (and I haven't that sort of cash and time spare myself).

G