In the blink of an eye.

Another part of the PPL syllabus is demonstrating that you can recover from a spiral dive.

Without crashing.

Or breaking the plane.

The last one isn’t much of a joke, you get very very close to redlining your airspeed. Red line = V_ne (never exceed speed). After this speed the manufacturer can’t guarantee that bits won’t start falling off of your plane.

My previous exposure to them has been two fold, if you let the nose drop during a steep turn then you can quite happily end up in one fairly quickly. That one happens to most students the first few times they try them. The other method I’ve come across is if you get distracted (Bob’ll get me to do some pointless map reading, other instructors favour the “oops, I’ve dropped my pencil” routine), again it is easy to let the plane bank and the nose drop.

Last lesson though Bob introduced a new one, the failed spin entry.

Spins are very different beasts to spirals. In a spin you are stalled. In a spiral you are most definitely not. The recovery technique is very different. Try the spin recovery for a spiral dive and you are in all kinds of trouble. The airspeed is the key.

But this particular entry method is nasty because right up until the moment your ASI zooms towards the red, you think you are going to stall. I was certainly convinced.

I was 100% certain that Bob was lying to me and was about to put me in a really nasty aggressive climbing turning spinning stall. Until the nose went over and he called “recover”. Literally the ASI went from the “so-low-that-you-are-going-to-stall-any-minute” end of the arc to the “oh-man-you’re-gonna-break-the-plane” end, I swear without passing through the space in between.

If I didn’t know that spins aren’t on the PPL flight test, I would have been convinced that I was in one and done all the wrong, potentially plane breaky things.

In the blink of an eye you can go from one extreme attitude to another, you really need to be sharp and watch what those instruments are doing.

I think I’ll be okay but it truly shocked me how quickly the airspeed started doing crazy stuff.