Round & Round &...

6/23/2005

Wow! Spins! What more can I say...

Bruce, my CFI, insists that his pupils experience some exposure to spin training. Spins were apparently taken out of the PPL ASEL back in the 50's due to some pilots dying during spin training.

Bruce's argument is that one has to have experienced a spin to have more chance of recovering from one, as opposed to just receiving theory on the subject.

We climbed to 4000, and performed a few stalls to get us warmed up....then it was time for the spin.. full stall/power low/hard left rudder to induce the spin...then it felt like mayhem. Spinning rapidly to the left, nose diving at what seemed a steep dive, I gave the little Cessna 150 hard right rudder, then gently pushed forward on the yoke......the hardest part for me was then pulling out of the dive..the g's were awesome. I don't have a clue what g's we pulled, but it felt like 2.5 - 3g's...

We performed two more spins, this time I got out of the spins without any assistance from Bruce. Cool.

We then went back to the traffic pattern and performed a couple of touch and goes. the downside to this lesson was that I felt 'not good' after the spins.... thus I brought the lesson to a close at .8 hr...still, was a good lesson. Time sure does fly - I now have 7 hours in my logbook! Early days I know, but one has to start somewhere.... :-)