Flight Training: TO SPIN OR NOT TO SPIN THAT IS THE QUESTION

The FAA requires that you have Knowledge of spins and recoveries. They do not require that you actually go up in the airplane and do spins. So the question becomes should I have an instructor spin me or not. In most cases the student will just follow the flight instructor in the training course syllabus. If spins are not there then you won’t do them.

For a period of time I was actually requiring students that I trained go up and do spins and I will tell you that story. Out of all the students I have instructed over the years. I only had one that was totally opposed to doing spins and I did loose that student. My reaction was at least my signature is not in your logbook when you kill yourself.

A little story to think about. Back in about 1992 after I had been instructing for a few years I was in the office of the local FBO I was working for. I was waiting for one of my students to come back from a solo flight. A little while later my student came in. He looked like he had just seen a ghost. He was shaking and sweating and you name it. He flat out didn’t look good. I asked him what happened. The answer that I got was one that most flight instructors would not want to hear. “I was practicing stalls in the practice area and all of a sudden I was upside down and then just spinning towards the ground” . “ I didn’t know what to do but I heard your voice tell me to pull the power back and just let go of the control column and the plane will stabilize.”

If you know anything about small Cessna’s they tend to have a forward CG and will recover if you just let go of the controls for a second. That is if you are not in a fully developed spin. So that is what the student did. The even more upsetting part to me was the fact that he stated once the plane stopped spinning and the nose started to come up, he looked at the altimeter. He said it was reading about 1800 – 1900 Feet.

If you fly in the phoenix area you know that the ground elevation is approximately 1500 FEET MSL. So my student recovered about 300 to 400 Feet about the ground. This is far below normal traffic patterns. So my question to you is would you like this to happen to you. Because it can happen to you. Or would you rather have an instructor go over spin entries and recoveries with you?

I was taking aerobatic flight lessons at the time and had practiced plenty of 3 to 4 turn spins so I got the parachutes on and Up we went. So I started demonstrating spins and spin entries and he just kept saying “ nope that is not what happened. It finally dawned on me what had happened and I said to him is this what happened and sure enough I had hit the nail on the head.

The spin my student got himself into was one of the worst cases you could imagine. He was practicing power off stalls. So the normal recovery is to lower the nose and add power and start retracting flaps 10 degrees at a time.

Little did my student know that the plane had started to enter the spin when he added full power.The result was a torque roll that placed the plane upside down at first, then continued to spin with the help of the full power setting. I didn’t think that a 152 was capable of that but sure enough it was. So he pulled the power and let go of it recovering about 400 feet above the ground.

So I think every pilot out there should had done some type of spin training. Now that I don’t have an aerobatic airplane I do a flight the shows the students how to enter and recover from the spin. This is not a full spin lesson but it shows the student what to expect.

If you would like more information on this here is the FAA Advisory circular on Spins.
spin awareness


Hope to see you in the Sky

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