Glider pilot, gliding instructor and coach / examiner. I also instruct in motor gliders. I love flying of any sort! Check out my book - Adventurous Soaring at www.mikefox.org
Another advantage: you can close the airbrakes and clear over other obstacles like retrieve buggies with drivers that aren't paying attention to traffic on final approach!
If only such instruction occurred. Pay quite expensive club membership, spend 14 hours on the airfield, get 2 or 3 ten to twenty minute cables. Surrey Hills, Hinton, Shenington, all the same. Rip off shysters, use your money to subsidise themselves.
Some clubs are definitely paid for by the members for the benefit of a few. The first club I flew at was like that, but there were a couple of instructors who did actually try and teach. The rest were only interested in getting boxes ticked then going flying themselves. UK aviation is generally broken. We delude ourselves and think we're great, but we're not. The ATC system is a freaking mess.
In the same lesson I have experienced both the "lookout drill", and "Why didn't you turn into the lift as soon as you feel it?" patter. Glider pilots. Love them. LMFAO :)
For the discerning Ivor Biggun affectionado there is only one correct response to the question 'What's your attitude'? 'Pig ignorant ........... and rude'. (Great video by the way)
When I was practicing landing as a student glider pilot I once managed to induce a spin while turning final. Luckily my feeling had developed well enough to immediately recognise my inner wing falling away and take corrective actions. I didn't feel any steering input from the instructor but he did reprimand me afterward. I'm glad I'm still alive because I was less than a second away from being unable to recover at 80m/250ft agl. Very informative video!
In the early '50s when I first began learning to fly, my flight instructor had me doing stall and spin recovery in the first hour in an Aeronca Chief over the northern Illinois farmland. If your airplane is not placarded against intentional stalls and spins, you should be practicing those maneuvers occasionally with emphasis on recognizing conditions leading to a stall or spin, and timely smooth recoveries.
I had the unusual luck to have an ex-french airforce instructor as my glider instructor. He learn me “real life” spinning entries (over rudder low speed low bank turn, loss of speed in a typical thermal turn...). After that any usual training of induced spin (stall an full rudder) seems to me as artificial as a roller coaster at Disney. Fun but almost useless. I fully agree with the other comment: why waiting “full développed spin” to take the correct action? Later I was thermaling, a lot of inverse yaw and induced roll on this sailplane meaning a lot of rudder in and stick out. Get distracted, speed going down, stick becoming “empty” and voilà I was almost in a spin in no time. Thanks to my training, immediately recognized the situation, take corrective maneuvers and no drama. But quite a reminder...
Brilliant, thank you for sharing. I just got my licence this summer and spin training is definitely something I need more of. An interesting comment came from my examiner after my check ride, he said too many students wait for the nose to drop to realise they are in a stall, but you can stall with the nose staying up, so watch speed and variometer. He said if you descent in slow flight more than 3 m/s you are in fact in a stall.
Bloody Hell! I was suddenly transported back to my Ass Cat course with you and DB!! I've never been able to demonstrate the 'nose below the horizon' that well. Cheers Mike!
Thank you for sharing this interesting video. I think this kind of spin avoiding exercise would be really good to practise with all gliding students or newly certified glider pilots. Because as we know from accident reports - this kind of spin caused by over-ruddered turns has already killed many glider pilots/students.
I like the idea of turning first one way then the other for the HASSLL checks: it makes it clear to other gliders that you're not thermalling (& hence not inviting them to come in below you).
I enjoyed this, thanks. Soaring conditions seem not unlike New Zealand North Island: relatively low cloud base and relatively weak lift - compared to Bruno Vassel's videos, which I do enjoy, but his landscape is so different with valley floor at 5,000'. You seem to have rather more controlled airspace than we do!
Again, thanks for the video. Can you comment on the CG location during this flight if it is unusual in any way? This video is getting some traffic among glider pilots for how demonstrative it is. I've got a couple hundred hours in a 4 and thought it was not possible for it to enter a spin so dramatically (I tried). Can you comment on the CG location during this flight if it is unusual in any way?
CG was about 5cm in front of rear limit. I have been able to spin it when it was nearer the middle of the range. I find all gliders spin the best from the over-ruddered entry flown here. The oldschool raising the nose and kicking on the rudder is not so effective. 4 is the best - been flying mine for about 15 years, and have nearly 1k hrs in it. Keep thinking about changing, but what would be the point!?
this is an excellent demonstration of an over-ruddered spin, which can catch any one of us by accident if we're concentrating on something else, or if we react too quickly to something in a thermal. What can also catch the unaware is a straight-string spin, flying perfectly coordinated but at a slow airspeed. After watching this video, our club brought both spin-entries into the springtime check ride. It also sneaks up on you and has fewer pre-spin symptoms than the skidded turn. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7-UOMTUs7xA.html Although the plane in this video is a Puchacz, the same can happen in any other sailplane once you bleed off the speed in a turn. The higher the bank angle, the higher the stall speed. Straight strings don't prevent spins!!!
No - straight strings don't prevent spins, but you get an awful lot more warning of the stall and spin if the string is straight in a turn. The nose is higher, you get a lengthier and deeper buffet, and the controls feel different for longer. Thanks for the comments. Where do you fly? By the way I have spun the Puchacz thousands of times during instructor training, and you can get it to spin the opposite way to the turn with top rudder. Great fun!
I hated spinning so much in my training that when I went solo I swore I would overcome my fear and became very good at spinning... so much so that all the single astirs we had where grounded for a while and notices sent world wide lo because I held an astir in a spin for ,,,well lost count at six revolutions,,,recovery was a terrifyingly slow process... so much so I panicked and pushed so far forward on the stick ....I bunted the glider.... lost an insane amount of height and recovered at 800 feet never again lol
Hi Stephanie, the Grob-family of gliders were designed to be mostly spin-stable or spin-reluctant, the G103's especially. I tried to teach a spin recovery in a G103 Acro II years ago, my student over-ruddered so much that the fin stalled. We had to pull back on the stick fully and kick full rudder to get it to enter the spin, and as we'd been warned prior to the flight, it would take at least 2 full turns to recover, which it did. We did this at height, so not a scare. Later on I was flying the CS-77 (license built G102) in a contest, I was the lowest in the thermal. I very much over-ruddered and it snapped into a spin immediately. As I'd been teaching spin recoveries all summer, my height loss was minimal but it definitely shook me up and I didn't make that mistake again. Grobs are stall and spin resistant, HOWEVER, like all planes, will eventually bite you in the butt. I'd recommend using a Puchacz to a refresher as it has a similar mass and inertia to a Grob. Glad you eventually recovered, 6 turns is test pilot territory!!
Brilliant! I see all too often a fetish among certain check pilots of requiring a spin to develop before recovery begins. That builds the wrong muscle memory when you get a spin entry turning final.
As others have said, great video and thanks for posting. So.... did you get back? I hate spinning and dread my annual flying review. Last time I practiced spinning in Puchacz, I didn't recover properly and it went the other way. Couldn't resist putting the video on RU-vid.