Originally Posted by
mikearuba
Holy crap! That's incredible.
For the seasoned CFIs out there, would you recommend always loading the plane to utility category when doing any air work?
My concern is that while practicing stalls with a student, we could enter a spin in a normal category loaded aircraft which could prevent a recovery.
Thoughts??
I wouldn't worry about that. If a student turns a normal stall into a spin, you should be able to recognize and recover before the spin fully develops. If you haven't yet, go up and do a bunch of spins to the point where you get bored. At first a spin seems to develop very quickly, but as you get used to it you will realize there is a good amount of time from when a stall goes bad to when it becomes a spin.
I only had one serious scare with a student doing stalls. We were in a light sport aircraft that is certainly not spin worthy and extremely unstable around the vertical axis. By that point I had done so many power on stalls in that airplane with that student that I was a little too relaxed. I saw that he forgot to add the rudder as he added power and pulled up, but wanted to teach him a lesson by letting him experience a wing drop, which is violent in this plane. He ended up pulling back quickly and despite it being 2 years since my last spin I still remembered the feeling. I went from being bored, to being in denial that we were going to spin, then to acceptance of the fact that we were going to spin, and then finally a remembered that I was in the one aircraft I really didn’t want to spin! Despite all of that, I had enough time to push the nose down and give opposite rudder before we entered a fully developed spin.