2009 Lawsuit

Many flight manuals of newer gliders say that a spin will turn in to a spiral dive on its own after a few turns. Spin and spiral dive recovery are, of course, quite different. If you've lost situational awareness enough to inadvertently spin, not noticing the subtle transition from spin to spiral dive might happen too. Also, reading flight manuals, a few of them recommend somewhat different recovery than "standard" that we were all taught.

This has little to do with speculation about this accident, but it's an interesting related fact. Reading the flight manual about spins is a useful winter pastime.

John Cochrane

On Thursday, January 16, 2014 10:28:12 AM UTC-5, wrote:
Many flight manuals of newer gliders say that a spin will turn
in to a spiral dive on its own after a few turns.
Spin and spiral dive recovery are, of course, quite different.

Please note this probably has NOTHING to do with Tim's accident:
Experienced pilots have become confused and thought they were
in a spin when in fact they were in a spiral dive.
IIRC a prominent example was the crash of an Eta during
a spin test...

Quick:
- how do you tell the difference?
- recovery technique?

Hope that helps,
Best Regards, Dave

On Thursday, January 16, 2014 10:28:12 AM UTC-5, wrote:
Many flight manuals of newer gliders say that a spin will turn in to a spiral dive on its own after a few turns. Spin and spiral dive recovery are, of course, quite different. If you've lost situational awareness enough to inadvertently spin, not noticing the subtle transition from spin to spiral dive might happen too. Also, reading flight manuals, a few of them recommend somewhat different recovery than "standard" that we were all taught. This has little to do with speculation about this accident, but it's an interesting related fact. Reading the flight manual about spins is a useful winter pastime. John Cochrane

Also worth noting is that T tail sailplanes commonly do surprising(to those not familiar)things in pitch during spin recovery. Commonly, as the stick is moved forward to unstall, the nose will pitch down, followed by pitching up a bit as the horizontal tail goes through the wake, followed again by pitch down(sometimes a LOT) as the tail comes out of the wake and becomes more effective pushing the nose way down. This easily leads to a very low nose with speed building at a very high rate. Add to this the autorotation associated with the spin entry and you have a very disorienting situation. You are in a high speed spiral before you know it.
This is why many flight manuals, and I directly quote the ASW-27 manual, say to apply opposite rudder and ease the stick forward until the rotation stops.
Jamming the stick full forward, as some pilots have been incorrectly taught, makes the end of the recovery much more difficult due to the behavior described above.
FWIW
UH

Jamming the stick full forward, as some pilots have been incorrectly taught, makes the end of the recovery much more difficult due to the behavior described above.

Really? Recovering from an inverted loop sounds easy...

John Cochrane