A long history is fine but you apparently are not without your challenging experiences. We all have them. You volunteered one and I am asking about it for the sake of learning, not to tear anyone down. My goal is to find out how to fly safer. The 3 hour pilot and the 30,000 hour pilot are both dead if they crash. We need to check the attitude at the door if we want to learn from our mistakes and frankly it sounds like you made one with this guy.

Exactly what ceiling and altitude do you have in mind? FAA recommends a recovery deck of 1,500 AGL for air work. Earlier we were talking about your student spinning out of the pattern, not doing air work. Which is it? If you are making a hypothetical point, then as a rule I never do air work at pattern altitude. I must be able to recover from ANY mishap by 1,500 AGL or else we are not doing air work that day. I do air work at 4,000 AGL with new students.

I know how saturated flight instructing can be and I know an occasional student can wig out on you. It's your blame-shifting that confuses me. The buck stops with us as instructors. If I had allowed a student to spin me out of the traffic pattern I would be a little concerned about my teaching procedures to have allowed it to occur. You don't strike me as being worried here. The instructor is 100 and one percent responsible for the outcome of any flight he leads, especially those with new students. No blame shift is allowed. You don't owe me anything here, but you owe it to yourself to get straight with whatever it is that happened. Saying it was the student's fault simply is not an acceptable conclusion.

Ok I just asked. That's where most pattern spins occur.

I did not judge anyone, but your story is curious to say the least and you are shifting the blame also. Close calls are no fun to tell but they can save lives if we take responsibility for them.

Come on, any good instructor does both. You glance at the slip skid, then glance around for the traffic, on and on. The point is you do not stop the glancing process until the student has shown skills in slip skid coordination. Especially if this was a new student, then were risking too much by not guarding the slip-skid ball.

The late turn to final scenario of course does not happen at pattern altitude, it happens at about 350 feet AGL. Point taken, I was just trying to understand what happened. Apparently this student just wigged out at the top of the initial climb, is my best guess. You still haven't really explained what happened.

 

Cubdriver, you have been PM'd. I would appreciate a response.

 

The 3 hour pilot and the 30,000 hour pilot are both dead if they crash. Not necessarily. Ask me about it sometime. Maybe I'll even give you the NTSB file number to check it out for yourself. Talk about learning experiences. We don't need self-righteousness on here questioning other people's integrity and/or credibility.

 

Response sent. Never any need for bad vibes among pilots. Life is too short, and we can discuss many other things here in Flight Training. Fly safe.

 

Several Cessna clips of this are presently found on YewTube. Catherine Cavagnaro takes the cake with a 60-turn whopper from a few years ago. It's fairly simple Newtonian physics. These clips make me wish for a hi-def camera from Santa. 18k on down maybe?

 

Since were talking about spinning, I'll share a unintentional spin experience. I was helping a student with maneuvers for his CFI Initial in a C152. He preformed a powered on stall, felt weird, didn't look right. I took the controls pitched up around 30 degrees had everything coordinated, watching the speed drop, waiting for the stall.

The nose broke violently straight over, violent enough to rip our headsets off and throw them to the back of the plane. The plane went into a power on inverted spiral spin\dive. Took about 1 turn before I was able to retard the throttle. I put in opposite rudder, and it took 3 more turns before it broke the spin. Pull out was just under Vne. I was very careful on the recovery to not over stress the aircraft at that speed, and that close to the ground. Recovery was around 1200 AGL. My student asked me to let him know next time we were going to spin. I let him know that it was unintentional.

I could tell there was something seriously wrong with the aircraft the way it entered the spin, and handled during the spin and recovery. I was talking to a 35 year CFI about what happened, and he asked me to not ground the plane, he wanted to take it up to see what I was talking about. 15 minutes later he came back, grounded the plane, and said he couldn't stall it without it trying to spin on him. Owner of the school saw we grounded it, decided to take the grounded aircraft up, because we didn't know what we were talking about. Came back a few minutes later pale white, almost impacted the ground.

Mechanics found that there was a structural failure in the empannage, it was being held up by 1 bolt. You could see it flex by lifting up on the tail. The failure points had some slight corrosion on them, so not really sure when the initial damage occurred.

The aircraft was problem prone, high air-frame time, I usually changed my schedule to not use it. This flight I happened to not be able to change the schedule and didn't want to cancel a lesson with a student over my distaste for an aircraft. Least to say I refused to ever fly that aircraft again.

 

Nice report, thanks.

Renting a trainer such a 150/152/172 Cessna with high airframe times means being extra careful about the condition of the airplane. I have witnessed high-time, worn out trainers being offered for rent with annuals which were not worth the paper they were written on. In short, they were not airworthy. The fact that FAA certified mechanics signed them off is not always proof positive they are good, because it is not a perfect system of inspection. Pilots who do spins and stalls need to be extra careful and use common sense.

How do I know an airplane that I spin is safe? I use the FAA certified inspection process as one element for sure, but my own preflight inspection coupled with my own common sense is the other element. If anything gives me the chills about flying a used trainer, then stalls, spins, even pattern flight are off until I feel better about that airplane. There is no shame in saying hey, this airplane is too old and crappy for my sense of safety. Alosl never do intentional spins unless you have been trained how to recover from them. They are not a big deal but some pilots get scared and do the wrong thing.

Cessna 150 and 152s need a one-time rudder-stop modification in order to keep the rudder from overrunning the rudder stop. The latter can cause to to rudder lock up. Someone died for that little bit of truth. Do not perform intentional spins in an unmodified 150/152 without making sure the rudder stop modification has been been performed. Also, get some spin training before attempting spins in any trainer.