I don't think it is.

from the accident report
The pilot realized that they had started to spin and
that, in order to come out of the spin, he pulled back
hard on the control stick and applied full flaps, without
regaining control (no surprise there then)..........the
glider quickly gathered speed (?)....and the flaps
got heavier and heavier.
....the flap position was 2 deg positive.

I fly an ASW17 and in my conversion brief I was told
that the first action is spin recovery was flaps to
neutral. If this action was not carried out then recovery
was not certain. It would appear from the exerpt from
the Nimbus manual that the same applied. It is to be
hoped that some of the above passage is the result
of iffy translation, if not it is a very strange sequence
of events.

The report conclusions do not help. I am no expert
on the 4DM but is it possible to exceed VNe in a spin?

At 11:54 21 June 2005, Mark Wright wrote:
Please tell me that this posting is a wind up !

At 09:12 21 June 2005, M B wrote:
Neither this report nor the Minden report it references
mentions anything about the ASI installed.

Were they the wrap-around types which cause
the pilot to not know if the glider is in a spin or
a spiral?

I personally have been in a spiral in a glider, and
not knowing it was a spin or spiral, have done the

spin recovery. Fortunately the glider performance
was low enough this wasn't a problem.

To verify this, I replicated the same situation twice
more
on the same flight. It was surprising how little
onformation I could get through windspeed noise.
I was relying on the ASI, and it was ambiguously
reading either 30kts or 100kts.

Only after landing and seeing the GPS info did I fully
believe that I was spiralling, and not spinning, even
though
I watched the ASI go only from 'fast' to 'really fast.'

Are these gliders regularly installed with
the wrap-around type ASIs? Could 1.8 seconds of confusion
be a contributing factor in these cases?

Of course, assume for the moment that the translation
to
english is awkward and the mention of 'spin' may
be mistranslated...

Has anyone else on this group ever looked at a
wrap-around ASI and wondered what it said?

Have you tried this with students, having them close
their eyes and violently shake their heads and then

try to recover the glider in an unusual attitude?
And have them get confused?

I certainly see the value of the wrap-around ASI and
the added precision it allows during normal flight,
but
I'm not terribly fond of them for spin vs.
spiral recognition. I don't trust my hearing as
an airspeed indicator during stressful situations.