By Tom Myers
Adventures in Inverted Spin Land
In the summer of 1992, I bought my Stephens Akro and moved up to the Advanced category. Of course, that meant learning lots and lots of outside figures. The learning of one outside figure in particular, the outside spin, led to some pretty interesting adventures.
Before purchasing the Stephens Akro, I took 10 hours of dual instruction with Fast Freddy Abramson in a Pitts S-2. I’ve long since lost count of the number of times that what I learned in those 10 hours has saved my rear end. In particular, Fred would get the plane all wound up in myriad of multi-axis gyrations and then he would say, “Your airplane,” and it was my job to deal with it. The main lesson was there was nothing the airplane could do that I could not recover from if I calmly executed the recovery steps I learned. True then, true now.
So, of course, one of the first things I do with my new purchase is take it up to practically the stratosphere, turn it over, and try spinning it inverted. My entry technique left a lot to be desired (more about that later), but I did manage to fumble my way into my first inverted spin in the plane. The bubble canopy afforded me a wonderful opportunity to watch the ground whirl around me.
Okay, let’s try recovering. Confirmed power off, stick no longer forward, pressed on the rudder pedal opposite the spin, and … spinning even faster. Uh-oh.
Wait, I could deal with this. I knew how to do this.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath to mentally reset the situation.
I opened my eyes, sighted down the cowling, pressed on the rudder pedal opposite the spin, and … it stopped spinning.
Pulled to horizontal, put power back on, established a climb, and tried to figure out what happened.
During my first recovery attempt, I was pressing on the pro-spin rudder and accelerating the spin when I moved the stick aft. During my second recovery attempt, after I tilted my head forward and sighted down the cowling, I pressed on the anti-spin rudder and the plane recovered.
My first contest in the Akro was later in summer 1992, over the long Labor Day weekend in Delano, California. I was not flying any 10s to be sure, but I was at least ahead of the airplane at that point. There was, however, one maneuver that was still a mystery to me; the inverted spin entry.
Sure enough, one of the first figures in the Advanced Known that year was an inverted spin. At least I would be able to try getting into it from the very top of the box, plus a few hundred feet. Or maybe more. I was way the heck up there, and frustrated that I had not yet figured out how to get the plane to do what I knew it could do. I was not going to let that happen in a contest, so when it came time to spin, I kicked that rudder hard.
Lo and behold, that is what it takes to get an Akro to cleanly enter an inverted spin, and did it ever. It was off to the races. I forgot for a moment that I was in a contest and simply enjoyed what I had finally done for an extra turn or two. I nailed the recovery on heading and pulled to horizontal with plenty of altitude and airspeed to keep going in the sequence. I have to admit that I was really tempted to just keep going, but decided that I would be far better off scoring some good judgment points by breaking and climbing after scoring zero on the spin, even if I should have gotten extra credit for the extra turns.
Fly safe.
