I'm aware of the instructional issues, as an ex RAF QFI. We used to be required to demonstrate spinning off manoeuvre; my favourite way into the spin was to do a half loop then pull hard and put full rudder in at the top. Having shown them the recovery once, I always let my student have a go.

MacSki, I'd also suggest that you get some aerobatic tuition. Experience in more extreme attitudes will eventually lead to you having much more confidence in both the aircraft and your own personal abilities and the fear will subside. :ok:

I'd echo Shy's comments. When I did the PPL in the '70s we did do spinning and wonderful T D used a 'flick entry' to get the Aerobat properly spinning. But it wasn't until I progressed to aeros that I felt fully at home with the AoA the wrong side of critical. Prior to that recovery had been a bit of a technical excercise, done by rote.

The aeroplanes I've flown generally give some clues to the pilot before they depart. Sloppy controls etc. That promts one to 'unload' with a bit of forward stick.

Without aeros currency I wouldn't be surprised if the natural reaction of most pilots to an gently-entered unintentional stall (the nose dropping away) would be to pull back. Even fast-developing departures (the Yak is good at those!) become recognisable as such with an instinctive 'ease forward to unload'.

Training to incipient is a bad as no training. If you've no idea what comes next you have no chance of instinctive recovery. And when what comes next arrives.... :eek::eek::eek:

I can agree that training only to incipient is not enough.

That said, once recovery from a full spin is down solid, the more vital skill is recognising and recovering from an incipient at low level.

If aerobatics are on the agenda, there are a wider variety of spin situations that need to be taught.

What do you fly?

I found myself getting very anxious when it came to stalls in the Tomahawk, because not only did I not know what would happen, but I knew the aircraft had a poor reputation for coming out of spins. Also, I once hurt myself stalling in a hang-glider and that memory came very much to the fore.

I went for a little spin training in an aerobatics aircraft and it did help considerably, though I would still get anxious if I were to stall a Tomahawk today. I currently fly C152s, and I practice some types of stalls in them alone and at altitude. After the Tomahawk, they feel almost disconcertingly benign - I understand the aircraft can still bite if you push it, which I haven't done as yet.

There's a lot of history and debate behind the decision to take spins out of the PPL syllabus, both in the UK and the states. The numerical evidence seems fairly clear that its removal has saved lives. On the other hand, flying is still risky even without doing planned or inadvertent spins and we choose to do it anyway. I chose to do spin training, not because I thought it would make me a better or safer pilot, but because I was interested to experience spins and thought it was worth the additional risk.

For the spin recovery to be required the aircraft has to be in a spin. For most common types the aircraft won't be in a stabilized spin until it has rotated 2 complete turns.

For virtually any aircraft if a stall recovery of forward stick and rudder against any yawing movement is applied anywhere during the first 90 degrees of rotation the aircraft will recover without any requirement for a
"spin recovery".

When teaching at the PPL level I emphasize the importance of developing the automatic reaction of forward stick and getting on the rudder to control yaw as power is applied to arrest the descent rate. Practicing that enough times so that it becomes instinctive is is the key to not becoming a statistic.

Personally I don't get the logic of spin training at the PPL. It requires the low time pilot to be so asleep at the switch that he/she lets the aircraft stall and yaw uncontrollably through one or even two turns but then suddenly rise to the occasion and apply the appropriate antispin controls movements in the right order and for the right amount of time.:confused:

I think it makes a lot more sense to spend the time on working on recovering from the stall before it becomes a spin, which isn't very hard as all you have to do is step on the rudder when the nosed snaps to one side.

Since the accident statistics clearly show most inadvertent stalls occur at low altitude your likely only chance to survive is a prompt recovery at the first sign of the stall. If you let the airplane depart into the start of a spin you are going to die......

So much fear over something so, well, quite a simple phenomenom, stalls are no more than exceeding the critical AOA. nothing more, nothing less. irrelevent of speed.
you pull a litte to far turning final, you hit the stall AOA. you simply release backpressure, only enough to get AOA back below critical AOA, only has to be 1 degree, and you unstall..fly as normal,

A proper stall recovery should loose no more than 10 ft in altitude. it can be done, just try it.. (look up stall stick position)

the key to preventing the spin scenario, is YAW.... keep your turns Balanced, you will not spin. no matter the bank angle.. simple. go to altitude and practice it with an instructor, a good instructor.
the cause of the turn final spin scenario is usually adding large amounts of rudder to quicken the turn, (almost everyone is guilty of this) at the same time pulling back to tighten the turn, now you approach stall AOA, with an unbalanced aircraft.. spin is likely. if you are balanced, no YAW moment has been introduced, you just tighten the turn with backstick, you stall, release backpressure, unstall, continue turn.. no spin. BALANCED turns are the key.

As for Spins, proper fully developed spins, all you do is introduce YAW at the point of stall..
as in the vid below, full back at 60kts to induce a G stall. then full rudder to induce the YAW moment, spin develops.
As said before, a proper developed spin takes a few turns to develop. the first two are the incipient stage. you will feel a reduction in cetrifugal force, to almost nill, once the spin has stabilised. as will airspeed and rate of decent.

Theoretically an a/c will not enter a spin without yaw and indeed, keeping the ball/yaw string in the middle will delay the spin.

But some aircraft will decide to spin with the ball/yaw string in the middle. Hint: anything advertised as aerobatic has the control authority to spin in conditions where most other a/c would not.

A little bit of aileron close to the stall can stall one wing first -- and there's your spin.

Derek Pigott, a preeminent glider instructor, wrote that gliders will not spin out of a 45 degree bank because the elevator in that attitude does not have sufficient authority -- the aerobatic Puchaz does:\

This is why recovering from an unintended spin is a big part of the initial aerobatic course. However it has about the same relevance to a PPL flying a Cessna or Piper as instruction on say avoiding mach tuck.

In that case I think you have the wrong story on Pa38 spins, many are wary of spinning them because they actually spin properly but the tail wagging can be quite frightening (hint - don't look!), but AFAIK there have not been big problems in the recovery.:cool:

Dammn, I can´t wait to start practising spin recovery, I´ve seen some videos on Youtube, but that one is really good !

GuilhasXXI

The story goes that the Tomahawk test flights went fine, but the production versions differed structurally slightly from the prototype. Something to do with reduced numbers of ribs leading to decreased wing stiffness. I've never been entirely certain whether to believe it - can you really make such major changes without having to repeat all the certification tests?

Anyway, it is apparently possible to get the weight and balance correct and still get yourself into an unrecoverable spin on some of the the newer aircraft.

We cannot look at spinning in isolation and I think this is where the attitudes to spinning go wrong.
No one talks of spiral dives? Somone posted that when practicing spins the aircraft kept going into a spiral.
That is so important knowing what the aircraft is doing and being able to instinctively correct it.
Stalls, spins, spirals should be regarded as one as one can lead to the other.
The well documented PC12 crash appears to have had the lot a number of stalls spins and spirals before breaking up and crashing.
The pilot would appear to have become disorientated and incorrectly recover resulting in a tragic situation

Pace

Quite a few glider pilots thermal with a small dollop of out-of-turn yaw string applied (indicating slight slipping), as it provides a little bit more insurance against the stall/spin scenario in a turn that's low speed and quite steeply banked (remembering that stall speed goes up with bank angle).

I don't think that is the reason. The yaw string is ahead of the centre of lift so if the yaw string is exactly fore/aft you will have in-turn rudder. Yaw string showing slightly out-of-turn means you have the correct amount of rudder.

Imagine a very long glider going round a small radius turn and you will see the nose has air flowing from one side, and the tail from the other.

I thought the only change was that in the UK that we required 4 point harnesses because they thought that the student had in some way fouled the controls in a 3 point. And there was all those AD's for the tail.

The Tomahawk Spinning Saga

Tomahawk: "As the rudder hits the stop, rapidly move the control wheel full forward and be ready to relax the forward pressure as the stall is broken."

Its been years since I have been near a tommy POH and the spins I did you never needed to apply full forward movement of the controls. You required barely any forward movement. And if a student did the thing would bunt and you would end up vertically pointing towards the ground.


Most of the damage in my view was done with over zealouse pulling out of the dives with secondary stalls/spins or completely busting Vne.

The flat spins people were getting into were due to control inputs of the ailerons which if you apply roll input the spin will go flat and it doesn't how much rudder input you put in it won;t come out until you release the roll.

There were quite a few changes from the prototypes. They added rumble strips and a few other things.

They were fine for spinning. It was just that they did it properly and you had to recover properly as well. If you just shut your eyes and did nothing it would stay in the spin unlike the cessna which 99% of the time would fly itself out of it anyway.

I have been in a cessna spin which it didn't come out of using the POH method and that was a whole different kettle of fish than a normal cessna spin and to be honest it was more impressive than the tommys normal spin. Thankfully it was a FIC instructors demo of why not to use the ailerons in a steep turn on the nibble doing a min radius turn.

Very picturesque, that Sunset Spinning in the Clouds video....but I sure didn't see any lookout for traffic!

Also, spinning down through clouds is a very poor idea. Almost as bad as skydivers freefalling through clouds.

Especially if you happen to be in a glider turning under that particular cloud, as did happen not too long ago.

Mary - hang on, maybe my imagination but I didn't see them going through the cloud hard deck in either of those spins.

I do agree with regards to some clearing turns but we don't know whether or not these were done before the clips.

While I truly believe clearing turns and a good look out are important to be provocative I sometimes wonder why. We turn 180 degrees one way and 180 the other, we look and we check for traffic but will we see traffic closing from below while we spin down and how likely are we happy to find ourselves in the same bit of space at the same time? To be provocative how many mid airs have there been as a consequence of not doing clearing turns? Just a thought.

yes, there were clearing turns done, before every spin, they are boring and not worth putting in an edited video. also, the training are the flight was in has a dedcated aerobatic box for such training away from students doing basic flight training. , no clouds or hard decks were broken during the fliming of these events. ... :ok:

Thanks for the clarification on clearing turns, Ultralights! And I was thoroughly impressed by the calm professional approach of the instructor, the alacrity of the stunt aircraft to enter the spin promptly on being provoked with the rudder when stalled, and the tidy way it rotates and recovers when asked. Big skies in Australia leave room for dedicated areas for such maneovers. In the UK we see people performing aerobatics in just any old bit of Clear Air Space. Usually they survive.

But the clearing turns should not be ommitted, whenever and wherever. If you are going to do 8 or 10 turns before recovery, you will use a column of airspace that is far from usual flight patterns, and so you have every duty to do your best to make sure nobody is going to come cruising by and penetrate that column when you are enjoying the sensation...and broken cloud can contain unpleasant surprises.

Those who are nervous of spin training (and I sure as hell didn't like it and contemplated quitting when first experiencing that nose down autorotation) do not need to do long spins to gain from the experience. I would always ask my students to put the glider into the spin, as the instructor does in this video, recognise that it is a spin and not a spiral dive, and do the recovery; in other words, the student has control for the complete exercise. Granted, a K13 glider is a docile craft; an aerobatic Cessna l52 quite lively, and engine management adds to the complexity of the recovery. That's about the limit of my experience, aside from messing about in K8 single seaters when you want to get rid of some altitude.....

As other posters have pointed out, the one that will kill you is the result of over ruddering a final turn, when trying to stretch the glide by raising the nose.....

Never heard a C152A described as quite lively before! There are plenty of other aerobatic aircraft I would consider as lively, but never a poor old C152. That said, learning aerobatics in one is good, simply because you can't rely on lots of power and lots of control - you really do have to fly it and coax it round each figure.