SPINNING

Jim Davis

I have been doing some long-range mentoring of a new instructor. I called her the other night to find out how she was getting on with her patter and preparation for the flight test.

She had been due to patter spinning in a little C152 and I had told her this was going to be fun – she would enjoy it and it was perfectly safe. So when I called to find out how it went I was blown away by her story.

They entered in a nose-high attitude and left on about 1600 revs to make sure there was sufficient rudder authority to get the show on the road. It seems they spun so fast that she was unable to count the turns – the countryside was a blur with no identifiable features to count.

Was the stick fully back? She was not sure.

Was the throttle fully closed? She was not sure.

Were the ailerons neutral? She was not sure.

How did they recover? Stick forward and opposite rudder.

REALLY? In that sequence? She was not sure.

Was there a pause between the two actions? No.

Was she able to patter it? Nope it was much too fast.

They did two spins to the left and gave it up for the day.

I found the whole thing deeply worrying. Either she was a panicky little girl – which she was not in the least as she is an intelligent, calm, solid, instrument rated, commercial pilot.  Or there was something else going on. They were going to fly again the next day so I risked putting my oar in and doing some long-range patter over the phone – and made her write it down. This is how it went:

As you enter the spin – throttle fully back.

Confirm the stick is fully back.

Confirm the airspeed is close to the stall (not in a spiral dive).

Confirm the direction of rotation.

Confirm the ailerons are neutral.

Firmly apply full opposite rudder.

PAUSE.

Move the stick forward until rotation stops.

Level the wings and pull out of the dive.

The ‘pause’ is bold and underlined because if you ease the stick forward first – even by a millisecond – the spin can speed up to the extent that you can’t count ground features going past.

The following evening she was able to confirm that all went splendidly – and she had all day to watch the ground and count the turns.

Instructors, I beg you not to teach spins unless you are totally relaxed and current and comfortable with them. One incident like this can do a lifetime of damage – or it may simply shorten everyone’s lifetime.

Let’s talk a bit about the fascinating history of spinning before we get on to the good stuff about teaching, or not teaching, them. This subject is as wild as the spin itself.

A spin is a condition where the aircraft is pointing steeply down. One wing is deeply stalled and very draggy, while the other wing is partly stalled, and flying around it. This means the aircraft comes down in a corkscrew motion with the airspeed only a little faster than stall speed.

Right, that’s dealt with the formalities. Now I am going to tell you about the bravest pilot in the world – an Australian named Harry Hawker.

The same Hawker whose company later built the Hurricane, the Hunter, the Sea Fury, and that most beautiful aircraft of all time – the Hart.

Let’s go back 111 years to June 1914. Picture this: Hawker is high above Brooklands in a Sopwith Tabloid. His goggles keep blurring as the freezing wind mixes with a mist of hot castor-oil – Castrol R – from the 100 hp Gnome Monosoupape. His nostrils are filled with its pungent smell which will at least make sure that his bowl movements are regular. He is shivering, possibly from the cold, but more likely from the thought of what he is about to do.

He plans to intentionally enter a maneuver that is statistically sure to kill him. Hawker is deliberately going to spin the aeroplane and hopes that his recovery plan will work. History tells us that it will almost certainly not work.

No one has ever deliberately entered a spin and recovered before.  It’s worth reading that again. Imagine how you would feel if your instructor said, “we are going to try a maneuver that is statistically certain to kill us”.

But Hawker thinks he can do it and survive.

Up until then there had been many accidental spins, and almost all ended in death. In fact spins were the biggest killer of pilots. No one understood what caused them, or how to recover. You were simply warned not to turn when the airspeed was low – because the spin god would grab you and hurl you into the dirt.

And no one knew how to recover.

But Hawker believed he had worked out a way to regain control. And he was prepared to bet his life on it.

He started the spin by deliberately running out of airspeed during the entry to a loop. The aircraft obediently dropped into the expected gyration. Hawker allowed it to do a couple of turns and then put his recovery plan into action.

It did not work.

He spun all the way down to the ground and crashed into a forest which left him cut and bruised, but alive.

While he was being patched up in hospital he thought of another method of recovery. He was so certain that his new procedure would work, that two days later he was again wiping the castor oil off his goggles as he looked down on the English countryside.

Before telling you what happened, I must take you back two years and introduce you to Lt. Wilfred Parke, RN.

August 25 1912. A crowd gathers at Larkhill Aerodrome in Salisbury Plain, England, for the return of test pilot Lt. Wilfred Parke, who has just broken the world endurance record of 3 hours in an Avro G cabin biplane. The Avro G has no forward windscreen, requiring the pilot to look out sideways for visual references. While spiralling down to land, the airplane suddenly enters a left spin.

Consistent with the prevailing theory on recovery from an apparent sideslip, Parke responds by adding full power, pulling the control wheel fully aft, and pressing the left rudder all the way to the stop. Rotation earthward continues unabated. Spinning ever closer to the ground, Parke perceives a force pushing him to the right. He releases the control wheel to centre himself in his seat, then applies full right rudder. The aeroplane immediately pops out of the spin, levelling off barely 50 feet above the stunned crowd! The event becomes known as the “Parke’s Dive”.

Wilfred Parke is the first to identify the need to use opposite rudder for spin recovery. His experience also highlights the fact that spin recovery actions are contrary to our natural instincts; hence, the appropriate response must be learned. Parke’s Dive is chronicled in the British publication, ‘Flight’, including the first-ever spin recovery procedure: Apply rudder opposite to the direction of rotation.

Unfortunately, Parke had only got it half right. Three months later, he spun a Hanley-Page monoplane into the ground when he tried to turn back following an engine failure after takeoff. He was killed.

Now we can return to Hawker’s windy cockpit. He thought that Parke had been on to something when he used opposite rudder. He believed that the other secret ingredient to spin recovery was to go against all instinct. Instead of pulling the stick back to recover, he would push it forward.

Hawker’s epitaph describes him as a “simple, clean, straight souled man.” Picture this slim 25 year old huddled against the cold in an open cockpit, high in a crisp English sky over Brooklands. He is half a world removed from his home and family. 

He is again prepared to bet his life on an idea. You can’t get much braver than that.

This time it worked.

So every time you recover from a spin, or even an incipient – say a quiet word of thanks to Harry Hawker – the man who was brave enough to save your life.

Right, that’s the end of the history lesson. We are now in 2025, and aeroplanes still spin into the ground. What’s to be done about it?

Basically, there are three trains of thought:

1. Teach pilots to do full spins and recoveries.
2. Teach pilots to recognize the early part of a spin and recover before this incipient stage develops into a full spin.
3. Teach pilots to recognize and avoid the conditions that could lead to a spin.

Now let me tell you that I am biased. I have only once accidentally entered a life-threatening full spin. I’ll tell you about it later. I was able to recover solely because I have spun so often that I am completely comfortable with spins. In fact I enjoy them. I have deliberately entered thousands of spins, and not one has caused a problem – even the ones that went flat, or were inverted.

In fact for instrument rating tests we had to do full spins in cloud on a limited panel – with the AH and DI caged so as not to damage them.

In my book, folks who have only been taught the approach to a spin, or an incipient spin, are not fully competent pilots – and certainly should not be instructing others anywhere near the stall.

Now, before your bleating becomes a roar of abuse, let me tell you that I am wrong.

Methods 2 and 3, above, have saved far more lives than the ability to handle spins with confidence. It is not my opinion – these are hard statistics supplied by AOPA.

You can see from Chart A, that by far the majority of fatal spins are started below circuit height. This means that knowing how to recover from full spins would not save you in something like 70% of all spins.

Now have a look at Chart B. Up until 1949 nearly half of all fatal accidents in the USA were the result of spinning. That’s a seriously scary figure. Anyhow in 1949 the FAA took full spins off the menu for PPL training. They were no longer compulsory. Look what happened – there was a massive decrease in the number of these accidents. Today the figure is around 8%.

If you find that surprising, have a look at Chart C. What hits me in the eye is that only one stall/spin accident, out of the sample of 465, was while crop-dusting. Amazing. Anyhow by far the biggest percentage of accidents happen during “maneuvering”.

AOPA say: Maneuvering flight is loosely defined, but usually includes any type of flight where a pilot is using the aircraft’s flight controls to perform maneuvers not necessary for straight-and-level flight.

Many pilots commonly associate maneuvering flight with unauthorized low-level flight such as “buzzing” but other types of maneuvering flight might include low-level pipeline patrol, banner-towing, aerobatics, or even normal upper-air work in the practice area. The NTSB defines maneuvering flight to include all of the following: aerobatics, low passes, buzzing, pull-ups, aerial application maneuvers, turns to reverse direction (box canyon type maneuvers), or engine failures after takeoff with the pilot trying to return to the runway.

Out of interest, according to the 2002 ASF Nall Report, takeoff accidents (including those that result in a stall/spin) are much more likely to be fatal than landing accidents. I don’t know whether go-arounds are classed as takeoffs or landings. Certainly they are badly taught in South Africa and account for many fatalities.

So maneuvering includes most of your training, which, in turn, includes steep turns, sideslipping, stalls, slow flight, spinning and incipient spins. (Interestingly they all start with a snaky “S”.)

OK, I got sidetracked, again. We were deciding how to handle spinning, and I was saying that statistically spin training shortens your life-expectancy. It still breaks my heart that this is the case – but the figures prove me wrong. Anyhow let’s look at the next option – incipient spins.

Perhaps these were an intelligent option forty years ago when instructors were mostly happy to spin, but now we have a huge number of instructors that are shirt scared of spinning. You really don’t want to be doing incipients with someone like that. Here’s what AOPA says about it:

In reviewing 44 fatal stall/spin accidents from 1991 –2000 classified as instructional, AOPA  found that a shocking 91% (40) of them occurred during dual instruction, with only 9% (4) during solo training flights.

So this leaves us with option 3. Teach people to recognize and avoid the conditions that could lead to a spin.

I agree that if you keep away from anything that could cause a spin then you will never spin. But we are talking about deliberate actions to keep clear of stalls and spins. So what do we do about accidental stall/spin conditions, perhaps while practicing steep turns or sideslipping or stretching the glide or turning to avoid trees you can’t clear after takeoff? How are we meant to avoid accidental spins? It simply doesn’t make sense.

In fact, it takes us right back to the dark ages when you were warned not to turn when the airspeed was low.

So we seem to have done a full circle. That was the perceived wisdom in the days of the Wright Brothers – and that’s still what we should teach pilots.

Something is very wrong. A spin is the most dangerous loss of control a pilot can encounter. So should we teach pilots,

1. Not to lose control – but if they do they are dead meat.
2. Not to lose control and how to regain control.

Or here’s another thought. Would you like your kids’ driving instructor to teach them not to skid, or would you like them to learn how to avoid a skid and how to recover from one?

Okay I am outvoted and I am wrong and I am very unhappy about it.

I love spinning.

Instructors, don’t despair – I have much more on the subject next month.