I did spin training at Ultimate high a few years ago and I firmly believe that without that training I would not have been able to recover from an inadvertent spin some years later. In fact having recovered from the first spin I went and tried again (doing stall tests after an AOA installation) and again entered a spin. The second recovery was much quicker than the first……
The cause was an incorrectly calculated c of g by myself.
Not only did ILAFFT, but I learned that I quite enjoy it.
But I am curious to know: Am I alone in this? How many pilots who have gained their PPL in the last, say, 5 years have done spin recovery?
You are not alone. Among other things I instruct from PPL to CPL ME/IR and have never performed a single turn of a spin in a powered airplane. Been taught spin avoidance from day one, have been teaching that ever since myself. Has worked out nicely for everybody. There are no spin approved aircraft in our FTO and what I fly at work was never spin tested.
This may change some time soon with the proposed EASA upset recovery training though. However, either my employer pays for that or I will give back my license. Under no circumstances will I pay a single Euro for aerobatic flying.
what_next wrote:
Under no circumstances will I pay a single Euro for aerobatic flying.
Why not? It’s fun. You learn a lot from it.
It’s fun.
I fly for work and do other things for fun. And what could I possibly learn from spinning?
What can you possibly learn from a developped stall recovery?
Stall is one thing but a spin is a different thing.
One can easily get into a stall, or at least an incipient stall, by simple things like climbing using the autopilot, which will always stall any non-auto-throttle aircraft eventually (unless climbing in an IAS mode and with a very low value preset, which will overheat the engine in the earlier part of the climb).
To get into a spin in any “normal” plane you need to have seriously mismanaged things, and the place it is likely to happen is at low level when spin recovery won’t usually be possible anyway. That is AIUI why spin training was dropped.
Among other things I instruct from PPL to CPL ME/IR and have never performed a single turn of a spin in a powered airplane
Don’t the FAA and EASA require Flight Instructors to undergo spin training? and in the case of Aerobatic instructors you need to demonstrate a precision spin, although precision spinning is not part of the basic aerobatic syllabus.
This at least is the case for U.K. FI courses. The checkride does not require demonstrating a spin.
Peter wrote:
Normally, AIUI, you cut the power, alierons neutral, opposite rudder, and push the stick all the way forward.Why would that not work?
That is also what I learned. In addition to that the PA38 was said to recover slowly from the spin so you had to hold those control inputs until rotation stopped, neutralise the rudder and pull out from the dive as the airspeed became adequate.
The Col4 manual says you also need aileron in the opposite direction of the turn.
Don’t the FAA and EASA require Flight Instructors to undergo spin training?
Our FTO trains a lot of instructors but has no aircraft which are approved for intentional spinning. Nor aerobatic instructors. So it does not seem to be an EASA requirement. My own instructor ratings I got under national regulations two decades before EASA and no spinning was required either.
In the UK / EASA: Definitely required, although not fully developed. I did my FI rating in a PA28, and we took the C152 for the spin training. No idea if that is an EASA requirement.
That training paid back when a student managed to get one into a spin which went even a bit further than what I had practised. Although it was in a different configuration (two stages of flap and approach power) and quite different to recover, it certainly removed the shock element of the entry to the stall. One could argue that I should not have permitted this to happen (I have a quite hands-of style of instructing…), but in the same way we train PPL students to recover from their screw-ups (recovering from a variety of stalls), it makes sense to train FIs to recover from theirs (student does NOT recover from one of his stalls).
In general, I have the feeling that no county really teaches the full EASA PPL syllabus, there are several exercises covered by briefing only. I would not be surprised if the FI programme was equally inconsistent.
