FTM Exercise 13: Spins

I have been fast and furious with my lessons and with the videos so it has been hard to keep up with the blog.  First off, here is the video of the lesson:


For those that do not know what a spin is, it is a rolling tendency of the airplane if a stall is aggravated by yaw.  That is, the tail slides out kind of like a car spinning on ice but you are also falling to the ground.  If you watch my video on stalling here, you will notice that the recovery process involves rolling the airplane without the use of aileron (turning the yoke).  If you were to try to recovery from a wing drop stall, you could turn a simple stall into a spin which is far more hazardous.  Here is a video of what it looks like from outside the plane:


Recovering from a spin is a relatively easy process if you recognize that you are in a spin.  You simply, set your throttle to idle, neutralize ailerons (turn yoke to centre), apply opposite rudder to the direction you are spinning, slowly pitch the nose up to stop the dive and finally add power back to climb.

In the beginning, I struggled with the natural instinct to pull back on the yoke.  When all you can see is the ground, it is amazing how strong the instinct is to pull back.  This is catastrophic.  You can see the instructor is very quick and consistently trying to break this reaction from me.  The g-force that a strong pull back induces can make the blood flow out of your head and make you loose consciousness at the very moment all your abilities and concentration are needed.  Also, since your airspeed can be substantial, it is possible to cause structural damage.  It took a few tries, but I did learn to fight the urge.

It is definitely a good feeling to know that I have the skill needed to deal which such an emergency.  I definitely think that I will try to take a lesson on spins and other emergency recoveries every now and then after I get my license.  Since it is not something I plan to experience in normal flying, I think that the skill could get rusty.

I did start to feel a bit nauseous towards the end, partly because we had flown the stalls lesson 2 hours before and we did a good number of back to back spins.  We called it a day and the instructor thought that I had the technique to recover properly.