On 9/20/2019 1:21 AM, waremark wrote:
Many gliders are not approved for deliberate spinning. Do you guys
recommend spinning them anyway? My approach to spin avoidance is to monitor
the airspeed, and to teach that if the nose ever goes down uncommanded to
push the stick forwards.

Practice, practce, practice.

Leads to (immediate) reaction(s), reaction(s), reaction(s). Good and useful
stuff...at many levels IMO.

Most of my flight time is in 3 ship types: 1-26; (V-tailed) HP-14; Zuni. The
latter two both registered in the (USA's) Experimental category.

The only one I spun was the 1-26.Seventeen turns max one direction; 6 turns
max the other (after which it always self recovered in [as I recall] a
slipping, spiraling, dive...which I never let continue very long). Difficult
(in the asleep at the switch sense of things) to induce any sort of departure
from controlled flight at my (light) weight, much less a spin...but a great
ship in which to practice inadvertent departures...and fun to spin, too.
Difficult to imagine a safer/better glider in which to "practice spinning."
SN105, and - as always, when dealing with spinning - YMMV!

I intentionally never spun the HP because I was unconvinced it had sufficient
tail-feather power to break a fully-developed spin, and, no one was paying me
to be a test pilot. Nor did my uncommanded-departure-practice suggest 'instant
spinning' was in my immediate future. Like the 1-26 it, too, required
serious/continuing inattention to induce even a hint of wing drop, and
'instantaneous' forward stick and opposite rudder quickly set things right
within 90-degree of heading change (the most I ever let it go).

The Zuni (as shown in the ship logs) *was* spun by a(n unpaid, I think, and
intentional) test pilot, but never by me beyond the departure-related wing
drop/initial rotation because of personal-skill-related concerns associated
with overspeeding the diving recovery...buttressed by my personal
rationale/concerns about the 'guaranteed repeatability' of fully-developed
spin behavior in any bird. That said, it too was docility personified in its
'asleep at the switch' departure-related behaviors (which varied with flap
settings). How do I know? Practice, practice, practice...

And so...just to be explicit, *I* certainly don't recommend anyone play Joe
Test Pilot in the spinning sense - *especially* if the ship's POH explicitly
prohibits spins. There's a continuum of ship-behavior (and time) between an
uncommanded departure from controlled flight, and a fully-developed spin, and
'practicing sensibly' along that continuum is what I seriously recommend.
Readers are free to interpret such free advice as they wish...or misinterpret
it, too.

Memory, and muscle memory, are your friends when it comes to the unavoidable,
ever-thin(ning) margin patterns and the (should be, dry chuckle) dreaded
uncommanded departure from controlled flight...which continues to be a common
source of pilot fatalities...a good 80+ years after general pilot knollich of
spins, their causes, recommended-recovery-methodology therefrom (or not,
sigh...) were 'essentially understood.'

Practice - and common sense - can be your friends. :-)

Bob W.

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