Spin Help

[DBrown]

The FAA publications are the ones I found that were the best. After spending money on ASA and Jeppesen crap, I always came right back to the AFH, PHAK, and other FAA publications.

The inside wing has a higher AOA in relation to the relative wind. The induced drag on the inside wing exceeds the total drag on the outside wing. Plus as the outside wing accelerates it wants to produce even more lift which will also tend to roll the plane towards the inside wing. So there are several factors in play when it comes to spins. My advice is if you are going to be a CFI, get yourself real comfortable with them and let your students scare the crap out of themselves so they know its no joke. That is my approach anyways. others will disagree because scared students sometimes quit. I'm more about keeping them alive and making them proficient than selling them on the idea.

Agreed, I also let my students scare themselves, & after a spin I rarely find myself saying "right rudder" any more

I got a good one "student flub up" on video so I show it to students right before we start doing stalls

Haven't had one quit yet.

 

[nosehair]

Can I ask a serious question? Setting aside the principal of intensity, why do we want to 'scare' students about spins? I don't inherently disagree with the notion, but the reality of the situation is that spins are just another thing that airplanes can do, not a wholly separate flight regime.

What I mean to say is that I'm concerned by the concept of 'scaring pilots away' from the edges. The edges, in this case, are soft and squishy ... and there's a whole lot to learn there that's not "Don't do that!"

Now I have zero experience instructing. With any luck, I'll have my CFI in a week and change ... but I'm not speaking from instructional experience. I definitely appreciate the concept of letting a student stall uncoordinated and showing them how it feels, don't get me wrong. But as a soon-to-be (I hope!) instructor, I do wonder if cultivating 'fear' based on unexpected outcomes of an event that they may already be worried about is the right way to approach it for most students.

Thoughts? Am I off-base?

~Fox

You are on the right track. Never intentionally let a student scare himself.
Talk and demonstrate everything before the actual practice.
Only if the student seems to not understand or "believe" would you allow a scary moment .

 

[n57flyguy]

Of course... induced drag. *ding* Perfect. Thanks for the great explanation. The ASA book I am pouring through doesn't mention induced drag at all in the spin section.

Actually, despite the positive reviews that book gets, I'm pretty disappointed in how the book is written. It's pretty disjointed, and the writing is not all that great. The organization of the topics and the discussion thereof leaves quite a bit to be desired.

My approach with the ASA books is to use it as strictly a guide, it does a very good job of organizing the resources needed to fully understand the subject, but a decent to poor job at explaining some more difficult concepts. To use it actively, I will have all my reference materials out and ready and when I come across a question that I cannot fully regurgitate to words, or want to make more sense of, I will find the answer in one of the books and note the guide accordingly. It also helps to learn how to quickly get through. say, 8083-25, and find what you are looking for.

It is what it is, a guide. It summarizes key concepts to closed door checkride answers.

rframe great points and explanation!

 

[n57flyguy]

My approach is a good ground lesson explaining stall concepts beating in the idea of angle of attack not airspeed, recovery in power off (landing config) and power on (departure config), and explaining spin concepts and PARE recovery.

I really like to emphasize the problems with stalls in maneuvering flight, as I think the way stall recovery is often taught limits the student's perception of stalls being a problem on takeoff and landing... that's not where most stall accidents occur. I demonstrate accelerated stalls and explain why this is a big problem when people start to gain more confidence than skill and start doing stupid crap like buzzing or flying too close to terrain. I also give most of my students a primer on mountain flying and talk about maneuvering in slow flight, in canyons, without horizon reference... which can be very disorienting and cause over-reactions that could induce a stall/spin.

I usually introduce power off stalls on the second lesson and power on stalls on the third lesson (giving a demonstration of yaw/roll instability and the importance of rudder to level wings. Then after they've practiced for a bit and understand the concepts I will ask them to explain spin recovery to me in flight and then I'll demonstrate spins. I think they are very disorienting for new students the first time so I like them to see that and absorb the process rather than fumble through it... they can read a book and watch youtube all they want, but there's nothing like that first sensation of whirling trees in the windscreen. Then if they want (I dont require it) I let them enter and recover from spins under my supervision. Of course, if they inadvertently spin due to a sloppy power on stall demonstration...well then that's just a free bonus.

Can give an explanation on how you teach accelerated stalls?

 

[rframe]

Can give an explanation on how you teach accelerated stalls?

We all know we are supposed to preach angle of attack and not airspeed, yet 99% of the time when a primary/commercial student is practicing stalls it's in straight and level (or mild banked turns) with slowly decaying airspeed. So we say one thing but constantly reinforce in practice that "the stall happens when the airplane gets slow"... so the accelerated stall demo/practice is where you get to show them the reality.

So I review the concept again, what is a stall and then we work through examples. My primary instructor showed me a stall on the backside of a loop with the nose pointed at the ground and the airplane accelerating, that's why the theory really made sense to me.

Get the airplane well under Va but well above Vs and start banking and yanking. Talk through scenarios of "ok here you are buzzing the beach and you come to the end and decide to do your airshow pull out.... wham", "you're in the canyon, you see trees, and terrain is rising and you bank and pull and.... wham", "you feel rushed in the pattern to fit in and your trying to accommodate traffic or ATC and making a tighter pattern than usual and you're overshooting and you roll way steeper than usual and the nose falls and you pull and.... wham"... etc.

So its just bringing the real world application in. I've often seen it setup as this roll into a bank with constantly increasing back pressure until the stall occurs... ok fine, but that's pretty abstract, so ask yourself does the student really get what is happening, do they see the correlation to the real world scenarios?

 

[Ajax]

rframe, props for explaining the practical reasons we teach this stuff. I don't know how many times I've done these with students and they still have no idea why we do them or when they would happen. I spent 30 minutes yesterday explaining when and why they occur to a student for his first stall lesson. Will he remember it all? No, but I don't expect that on the first time. But I'll keep reinforcing them as we go through the syllabus.