Mike Borgelt said
"<quote>There are definite hazards to spinning and the recovery with modern gliders has a good chance of going outside the envelope if you are a little slow in your actions and let it get beyond the very first stages of the incipient. Flapped gliders usually have a quite low max positive flap speed which is very easily exceeded. Let a spin develop accidently from a thermalling turn and you likely are in positive flap. Somewhere before the recovery you really ought to go to negative flap. I wonder if this gets tested during certification ?</quote>"
I would have thought (purely from a logical point of view), that if, as you seem to be suggesting, that modern slippery gliders are becoming more dangerous if a spin develops, ie, because of reduced responsiveness, they take longer to recover, they have a reduced safe speed range ie flaps have to be reset, they have faster acceleration on the dive-out-recovery, hence they have an increasing possibility / probability of over speeding, or, going into a spiral dive etc, that it was becoming *_/more necessary, not less necessary/_*, to ensure that spin training and all matters associated with flight at the back end of the envelope, and in particular, the consequences of tardiness putting you at the front end of the envelope in a hurry. In the case of the Nimbus accident in the US where there was structural failure, there was a lot of engineering done on that, and although no definitive answer was produced, as I remember, the consensus was that pulling brake presumably to stop a speed run-away during the recovery "pull" may have had the effect of concentrating the spar bending moments outboard of the brakes to a point beyond the design limit, hence the "sudden and near clean" separation of the outboard wing sections, with the inevitable result.
All this leads me to the opposite conclusion you seem to be pushing Mike. Prevention is better than cure as the old saying goes, but that doesn't mean rely on prevention and don't have the cure. By all means, push the theory, practice the incipients etc, but don't say, OK, we will stop there, because there is no statistically proven benefit of going further. I don't buy that, the Canadian study not withstanding. I don't trust statistical analysis in general, and in this case I think it is false logic. If anything that accident supports the opposite view. Those two US pilots killed in the Nimbus above were very experienced pilots, but, were they fully spin trained in the first place, were either of them "current" on spins, and were either fully aware of the particular handling characteristics of that aircraft at the front top corner of the V-N ? Since they were US pilots, given Mike Cleaver's post above re US-FAR requirements, probably not. So, if prevention fails, at what point do you begin the cure, and more to the point, which cure, for which aircraft. Spinning in a Blanik can teach technique, but it is docile. Get into a spin in a hot glass ship, and you have to be "on the ball". The point is, theoretical training, reading books etc, doesn't come close to real world experience, not in flying, not in anything. If you don't have the trained reflexes from your time in the Blanik at least, and you haven't been flying in a regulatory regime that requires a yearly check ride with an instructor in a Blanik say, what position are you in when it happens to you later in your career, perhaps years and hundreds of hours later, in a hot glass ship ? The likelihood of being "on the ball" at that stage, seems to me about as likely as successfully pissing into a force five.
I conclusion, I think those who say full spin training should be curtailed are ignoring the long term consequences of not doing full spin training.
_______________________________________________
Aus-soaring mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To check or change subscription details, visit:
http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
