The most dangerous maneuver in aviation...and that's saying a lot.

Spins.  

You might be asking, what is a spin?  Easy explanation is, something you never want to by accident when you are flying.  I am pretty sure I talked a little about stalls in a previous blog.  A stall occurs when the air over the wings is not fast and thus doesn't create enough lift to support the weight of the airplane.  As a private pilot, you have to become intimately familiar with how to recover from a stalled condition.  This is important for students and inexperienced pilots to do because stalled conditions most likely occur close to the ground on approach to landing and during take off.  Awesome.

And then there's a spin.  A spin is a very dangerous and unpredictable animal.  A spin is essentially created during a stall when the nose of the airplane is allowed to yaw either left or right.  That yawing action of the nose creates unequal airflow over the wings.  When this happens, one wing is stalled more than the other and will create an almost violent and unexpected roll.  Once this occurs, the airplane does not want to recover like a normally stalled airplane will.  It will continue to roll and yaw and literally fall out of the sky.  There is a very specific series of control inputs that have to be completed in order to recover from a stall.  Forgetting to do any one of the 4 or even doing them in the incorrect order will aggravate the spin and make it harder to recover from if recovering is possible at all.  Fear not, I'll show you what a spin is in a second.  

So, in order to become a flight instructor, you have to intentionally spin an aircraft and properly recover from it in the case your student is unable to maintain coordinated flight during a stall.  A student pilot is only taught spin awareness and ways to avoid entering them but since a spin is so dangerous, they are not required and are often discouraged from performing them on their own.  So, as a (hopefully) soon to be flight instructor, I had my spin training today.  Of course, this lesson began with a sobering fact.

Twice in the last few weeks, a CFI took a CFI candidate up for spin training and entered a nearly unrecoverable spin...once in Atlanta and once here.  The scenario started with an airplane being forced into an intentional stall.  After a few rotations, the spin recovery checklist was performed and the airplane was not coming out of the stall.  The airplane here, after some violent control inputs, recovered after falling 3000 feet out of the sky.  The airplane in Atlanta, however, fell 5000 feet out of the sky and recovered only 600 feet above the ground.  The experienced CFI was so shaken up that he had to take a few days off.  Sweet...where do I sign up?  And by that I mean, do I really have to do this?!

So, today we did spins and it was AWESOME.  Don't get me wrong, it's not something that I would want to do intentionally for awhile, but it was awesome to "push the envelope" a little. I stood up to fate, looked "him" in the eye and said, "I DARE YOU."  Today, I won.  Tomorrow, well, I hope tomorrow is a long way away. I definitely don't ever want to get on the losing end of the percentage of airplanes recovered.  After all, it only takes one.  

Spin: What it looks like outside the cockpit.

Spin: What it looks like inside the cockpit