Mark Newton wrote:
Well put Mark, absolutely spot on. I was going to go a lot further and repeat what I said 4 years ago on this subject, but I don't need to now. Thank you for putting the reality back into what invariably degenerates into a slanging match.Alan Wilson wrote:
PS. Intentional rope breaks are in the same category. In 35 years of aero
tow at both ends of the rope, I have NEVER had a rope break, so why do some
purposefully and dangerously create such a rare natural event.
I saw two of them in two successive weekends in 2003 (one at ASC, then one at WGC the following week). I'm sure the pilots of the gliders concerned were pleased that they had received appropriate training in the 60 seconds subsequent to the rope breaks.
Your assertion that simulating a rope break is dangerous is questionable too: Do you expect that instructors are likely to pull the yellow knob when the glider is in a place they can't get out of? If they have lots of options, it isn't dangerous!
(perhaps you're confusing the terms "elevated risk" and "dangerous". I don't think the word "dangerous" means what you think it means)
Back to spinning: We must, of necessity, place faith in the designers and what they write in the flight manual. Yes, I understand that the flight manual refers to a brand new glider with clean wings, everything lining up and fitting just right, no control slop, perfect conditions...
... but then again, the flight manual expects that when it's talking about -every- maneuver. We accept that in real life things won't be that perfect, and we also expect that if the airframe has degraded far enough away from perfection to be unsafe that we'll ground the aircraft.
If the flight manual, and JAR22, say that a spin can be performed safely, and we take appropriate precautions, and we make allowances for less than perfect conditions, then there is no reason why a spin cannot be performed safely. Your assertion that we need to "Stop unnecessary spinning before more die," is simply not supportable by real life evidence.
I agree that 20 turns without appropriate preparation and training is insane: You're a test pilot at that stage. JAR22 certainly doesn't require any testing to that extent, and who knows what rhythms the aircraft will get itself into during a sustained spin.
But being afraid of spinning in the first place, and teaching that fear to other people, is undoing the work of people like Mike Valentine who implemented the spin training which is largely responsible for you being able to say, "Aviation has moved on, lets go with it." *ANY* glider can spin. Without training on recovery methods, spins are routinely fatal.
And here's the take-home message: Without training, EVERYTHING we do in aircraft is routinely fatal. Turns, launches, landings, straight-and-level flight, thermalling, aerobatics -- EVERYTHING happens at an increased level of risk, and training is one of the ways we manage that risk.
You may declare that spinning is a risky venture so you won't do it; But that's conceptually the same as saying that turning in circles is risky so you won't do that either. All it really means is that (a) you've set your personal risk threshold at a certain level, and (b) even after carrying out various risk management actions, you perceive that the risk of spinning is higher than that threshold.
A trainee on her second flight will carry out exactly the same analysis and determine that the launching maneuver is higher than her personal risk threshold, and hence expect the instructor to do it. With training, she'll eventually see that the risk of launching is lower than she thought it was, and adjust her perception accordingly.
The PURPOSE of training is to turn unreasonable risks into manageable risks through familiarity and understanding.
In Australia, at least one spin will be carried out each year for every flying GFA member (during the annual check). More spins will be carried out in basic pre-solo training. We're probably talking about something in the order of several thousand deliberate spins per annum, perhaps closer to 10,000 if we accept that most people do more than one of them per year and trainees do heaps of them before solo. Almost all of those spins are carried out sans-parachute. Particularly at winch clubs, most of them happen from less than 2000' AGL.
... and how many accidents do we have each year during deliberate spins? 0.1 ? 0.05 ? Pretty close to zero, really, isn't it?
Now look back through history: What has happened to the -accidental- spin rate during base-leg or final turns in the years since mandatory spin training was introduced? How long has it been since someone in .au killed themselves by spinning in from 400' during landing?
I don't accept that spinning is a risky maneuver if close to ten thousand of them can be initiated in Australia every year, with an accident rate approaching zero.
I also don't accept that any reduction in spin fatalities during circuits is due to the design of modern gliders which don't want to spin, because by and large Australians are still flying the same gliders they were flying 20 years ago, and they demonstrably DO want to spin.
Finally, your contention that risky maneuvers shouldn't be attempted in training (rope breaks, spins, what else?!) is completely unsupportable. We'll never know how many lives have been saved by the automatic responses we try to instill during spin-training. We'll never know how many pilots would have killed themselves if their pre-solo training didn't give them the experience of a low-level rope break. You assert that these things don't need to be in training because "in real life" they don't happen very often, but you have no way of knowing whether the REASON they don't happen very often is because they're covered so comprehensively in training!
In closing: I find that the attention this subject attracts, and the strong emotional responses it provokes, completely unfathomable. The reactions here are vastly out of proportion to the ACTUAL risk. Most of them also completely neglect to consider basic risk management, and the purpose of training. Sure, if you do spins without thinking about it you'll hurt yourself -- but we don't do that in real life, do we? Or if we do, its effects aren't significant, because people don't tend to kill themselves during spin training.
I think much of the reaction stems from the possibility that the protagonists *don't like* spinning, and they rationalize their dislike by saying it's "dangerous". That's understandable, but unfortunately not something that has been shown to be accurate.
- mark
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