Pilot enters intentional spin, for practice, but it quickly goes flat and takes him 26 full turns to recover; by which time, the engine has quit and he’s disoriented, but he managed to land in a marshy area. But the gear snagged on a wire fence and the plane flipped over.
So you take the view that pilots simply shouldn’t be risking their necks by practicing spins? It’s certainly one common view that I’ve heard.
But, OTOH, I’ve heard the view (and read opinions) that the better solution is to practice spins (and other potentially hazardous shit) more to become proficient at recognizing, preventing, and recovering.
A bit of background here: For 50-some years now, the FAA has NOT required (and apparently even discourages) spin training for pilots, on the theory that more student pilots (and their instructors) get killed doing this, than are saved by having that training. Instructors, however, are required to have spin training – but apparently there’s no particular requirement to have much of it.
One or two articles I saw (sorry, no cite handy – this was a while ago) argue that even instructors, having done their spin training, aren’t proficient, since they never practice it again, or maybe do one spin a year; the suggestion being that that’s the problem.
The argument that spin training results in more accidents than it prevents is weak, I think – obviously, deliberate spin practice would be done at altitude; whereas the vast majority of actual spin accidents happen from inadvertent spins in the pattern :eek: So I’m not seeing an implication that spin training, per se, is all that dangerous.
There’s similar arguments about training to deal with certain other hazards. In glider training, one hazard we get (some) training with is slack lines during the tow – if it gets slack enough and not recovered quickly, bad things can happen. (Like the rope getting wrapped around the wing.) Some of my instructors are reluctant to do much slack rope practice because of the potential danger. Are they unconfident of their own ability to handle it well?
(Anecdote: A couple months ago, we had one particularly turbulent tow, which at one point produced a massive slack line, at about 600’ AGL. The instructor immediately took over and tried to recover – and promptly broke the rope. My take: Hey, I could have done that! I keep the broken piece of the rope as a souvenir.)
So am I going to be the kind of pilot who is scared of spins, slack ropes, and such because my instructors are skittish about letting me practice stuff like that?
There you will find many threads discussing the spin training issue. As much as I love discussing our sport, I find non-pilots couldn’t care less once its gets beyond “What happens when the wind quits?” phase.
As a glider-only pilot, it makes feel like I’m in on a sort of secret when I hear (as I have in the last week) from F-15 combat pilots and career airline pilots “Now, THIS is real flying!”.
Perhaps you noticed (I quoted it a few posts above), Richard Pearse expressed that view just a few weeks ago after one of my soaring posts:
Yes, I follow the RAS site from time-to-time, and I’ve posted some of my early adventures there. (My RAS screen name is JJJ.) I see occasional posts from people I know, including some from my club. I’ve noticed that Ramy posts there from time to time – I just spotted this OP by him from a while back:
Ramy definitely IS famous in soaring circles, at least in the Western United States, and perhaps internationally. I saw an article about his exploits in some European soaring mag. He does 1000+ kilometer flights rather regularly, and he also does some spectacular photography! I posted a link to his blog with his pics a while back – here it is again. (Click on most pics to embiggen.) And look at some of those astounding traces – one of his flights appears to run from Truckee (near Lake Tahoe) all the way into Idaho!
While hangar-flying at Truckee last week, I overheard one of the tow pilots mentioning that, back in the day, he had towed for Neil Armstrong. I guess that puts me two degrees of separation from Neil Armstrong?
This wasn’t directed at me, but I’ll take a stab at it.
The FAA came down against spin practice back as I was working on my civilian private. I was in junior high school at the time. They did this for several overlapping reasons.
One of the big ones was that they had worked very hard for the previous 20 years to ensure most light planes are exceedingly spin resistant. So to practice real fully developed spins, you needed to find a non-typical airplane.
As well, the vast majority of spin fatalities happen from an inadvertent spin begun from an altitude too low for either Chuck Yeager or Neil Armstrong to recover from. So recovery training will save zero of those people. But extensive training on spin avoidance, coupled with a message of “screw this up and you’re dead for sure” *might *save a bunch of those people.
Doing spin training in a spin-resistant airplane has another problem. If they’re put into a spin with enough altitude that ground impact isn’t an immediate concern, they’ll recover themselves if left alone for just a turn or so. So to develop a true fully spinning situation, you’ve got to help it the whole time by holding in pro-spin controls. Which is anti-training.
“Here, do *this *to start the spin, then keep doing it for a long time to get to the real spin. Then when I say ‘recover’, start doing this *other thing *to recover.” If instructors beat that experience into partly-or wholly-scared students over and over, what do you suppose they’ll do the first time they slide over the edge into a spin? Yup, hold full pro-spin controls until they get over their startle. Too bad; the ground’s already here.
So in addition to the various valid points you made, these are the arguments that killed spin training for the FAA.
And once 1 or 2 or 8 generations of primary instructors have been minted who’ve never spun an aircraft, it becomes increasingly impractical and unsafe to try to reintroduce spins into the curriculum. All the well-trained would-be trainers are elderly.
From the other side …
In USAF in my era we did upright and inverted and accelerated spins in this: Cessna T-37 Tweet - Wikipedia . The Tweet is long gone, but USAF spin training continues. As, AFAIK does USN spin training. The value is not in recovering from a traffic pattern low altitude stall/spin screwup; If there’s not enough time/altitude for that in a C-150 there really isn’t time in a faster, bigger, or both, airplane.
The value is in recovering from a fouled up aerobatic or combat maneuver, a wake turbulence upset, a last-ditch collision avoidance maneuver, a flight control malfunction, an autopilot hardover, a windshear event, a structural failure, etc. When the airplane is going apeshit you need to be cool as a cucumber. Spins are a great way to develop that coolness under fire. They’re aggressively disorienting and depending on the airplane can have a lot of random bucking motion like a mechanical bull.
That coolness is IMO something very valuable that’s utterly missing in the crop of pilots who get antsy at 45 degrees of bank or 20 degrees of pitch.
The fix for you as a GA pilot is aerobatic training. And ideally some formation training taught by people who’ve done it in the military. Along the way in those areas you’ll learn how to use all 3 dimensions and all flight controls and flight parameters together to put the airplane where you want it to be and make it go the direction you want it to go. Whether relative to the ground (aerobatics) or another object in flight (formation).
An inflight event like, e.g., slack rope is no big deal if you can immediately and fluently see where you are now, see where you need to be in 8 seconds as the situation will develop, and know how to get there then from here now.
Bottom line: spin training was removed from airplane driver school. If you want to be one of those, follow that curriculum to its minimal endpoint and be safe enough in vanilla enough circumstances. Which for the vast majority of GA (and airline) pilots is all you’ll ever actually need. BUT …
If you want to be a pilot, get the aerobatic training at some point. I wasn’t just being poetic when I said you’ll enjoy your first steps into a larger world.
It *is *a larger world and old farts like Gus & Richard and I will tell you that your airplane *can *thrust you there any time it feels like it. Best to have visited that world before and become master of it. Otherwise you’ll just die all tensed up.
I realize now I didn’t address the mishap that triggered the discussion of spins.
There are airplanes that have spectacularly nasty spin characteristics. And those that have wholly unknown spin characteristics. FAA certification standards require spin resistance to be proven by test flight to X parameters. As long as the airplane meets that, there’s not a requirement to see how many more dragons live deeper in the cave. So nobody knows what’s in the cave. Not the manufacturer, not the test pilots, certainly not the POH you’re reading.
The spin was deadly in the early days of aviation precisely because it’s an aerodynamically stable condition. In cruise your airplane noses down if slow and noses up if fast which promotes both speed and altitude stability. Similarly, a generic non-spin-resistant airplane in a spin wants to stay there. Any random fluctuations that tend towards recovery are actively resisted by that stability and the airplane returns to a steadily spinning state. Likewise any effort you make with the controls to escape the spin must overcome that stability that wants to keep the airplane spinning. You must get “over the hump” to get out.
Depending on all the details of airplane and situation, it is perfectly possible to end up in a fully developed spin where there is no recovery method, period amen. Given a year to experiment with different ideas and control movements you’d never hit on a procedure that would work. More realistically, you’ve got a couple minutes until the ground arrives.
The punch line there is to only practice deliberate spins, or seriously nibble at deliberate spin entries, in an airplane certificated for intentional spins. Or one you’re prepared to jump out of and pay for.
practicing spin recovery is like practicing automotive racing techniques on ice. Just don’t do it. Stall recovery, yes. You should be aware of the conditions that would lead to a stall and what to do in the event of one.
Aircraft are not designed to recover from spins. There is no maneuver that will immediately correct for a spin. I wouldn’t do it if the plane had a built in parachute and I started at 14,000 feet. The risk greatly exceeds the likelihood of the event ever taking place. Spins are the result of a poorly executed maneuver. Students should be taught to avoid the conditions that create them.
Having said that I did practice stalls quite a bit as a student. And I used the technique on a check ride to great if not embarrassing success (don’t ask).
This to me is where the rubber meets the road, or… the water vapor hits the air, or something.
When I did spins as a CFI candidate in a C-152, I was surprised at how much work it was to keep it in a spin. The first couple of times I was startled and stopped crossing the controls, so it stopped as many aircraft will do with the controls neutralized. But we had to do three full turns to each side, so the instructor had to coach me to keep everything crossed up until it was time to recover.
This isn’t to say that the training was without value. But I was doing it as a CFI candidate. Coming away from that experience I felt certain it would be foolish to teach it to beginners for the reasons LSLGuy explains.
Some time later I took a full aerobatics course and did quite a few spins, both with an instructor and solo. My approach with my own students going forward was to thoroughly teach about spins on the ground, thoroughly teach avoidance in the air (including a demonstration of how stall warnings are often ineffective in certain entries, which I felt was really important) and encourage them to take acro training at some point.
Hey everybody, I’ve read your detailed remarks about spins, acro training, etc., and I want to read them all again (possibly several times) and chew on it all. (Too sleepy to really think it through at the moment.) I’m not ignoring all this!!!
As Emily Latella used to say … Never miiind!! :smack:
I was in a hurry to add some tie-in to the actual AAIB accident report and skimmed it very, very quickly. As a result I quoted it exactly backwards. Dumb ass.
Intentional spins are *permitted * in the Nipsy. I suppose I could claim that rohibi and ermit are *almost *the same letters. Except they’re not really. Oops.
Anyhow, that report is a very fine effort by UK AAIB. The right amount of specificity and the right amount of generic. For whatever reason, the US FAA & NTSB would be very, very unlikely to expend nearly that quality of effort on a non-fatal light plane accident in the US. Bravo UK AAIB!
One could learn a lot about the concepts behind spins and the practicalities of dealing with them from just that one report.
The other thing that stuck out at me, which ties into what I said earlier before reading the report, was that pilot’s cool in a bad situation.
From the start of the spin to ground contact was 73 seconds. In that time he started the manuever, tried 4 different recovery methods, giving each the time it deserved to work or not, recovered from the dive after the 4th one did finally work, became undizzy enough to land, picked a plausible landing place from some shitty alternatives, accomplished the landing that would probably have ended upright but for the wire fence, and after just 30 seconds to clear the mental cobwebs was on the radio for help.
That is grace under fire. Would that we all will be so cool when it’s our turn.
You suggested earlier that one of the virtues of acro training is the ability to handle weird upsets without freaking out. The report mentions that he is an acro pilot. So we have a case in point here.
A local kid (well, Anacortes; but close enough) has been resurrecting a crashed Cessna 170B. I’ve been following him for a while on Facebook, and yesterday he posted a photo of the brand-new airworthiness certificate.
Resurrecting a Cessna 170B [From 2014] The article has photos of the aircraft before he started working on it.
The KC-390 got a lot of very favorable press and attention at the recent Paris Air Show.
It has 5-1% more capacity than a C-130J, which has 5-10% more than a legacy C-130. It’s also vastly faster. I don’t know much capability the Brazilians are claiming for dirt runway operations; that’s typically a weak area for turbofans, even on high wings.
In all IMO if they can get some good sized buys from a largish air force someplace they’ll do very nicely with it.
20 minutes ago I watched a mass takeoff of single engine peop planes from the Dane County airport (MSN). Maybe 30-40 or more. I’ve never seen anything approaching this, not even at the Oshkosh airshow.
Can anyone point me somewhere to maybe find out who they are? All blue and white colored. I can’t swear they were all the same models but many of them looked like it.
