46 Soaring • August 2019 • http://www.ssa.org
(Photos by the author.)
N
o one can tell you what it will
take to make you a pilot. Oh,
there are maneuvers you have to learn
to certain standards and facts you have
to regurgitate, minimum hours of fly-
ing to accumulate, and types of flights
to complete. But no one can foresee
what will go into forging your aviator’s
mind. Certainly no one talks about
feelings worse to deal with than ner-
vousness or motion sickness. With the
introduction to spins, the understand-
able nerves I’d felt from the beginning
exploded into fear.
As usual, my flight instructor first
walked me through the new maneuver
on the ground. With a light person like
me in the front seat, he explained, this
aircraft will perform about half a spin
before flying itself out. The airframe is
so stable that it mushes wings-level in
a stall rather than dropping a wing, so
he would use aggressive rudder deflec-
tion to sharply slow one wing’s passage
through the air to get it to stall before
the other. He noted that the ground
would fill our windshield before the
glider “dished out” of the spin and
recovered itself. The official recovery
technique would be simple and easy, a
matter of releasing the back pressure
on the stick and applying rudder op-
posite the direction of spin. The most
important thing to manage during re-
covery would be the speed of the mo-
mentary dive.
Anyway, the spin itself. The experi-
ence was visceral. The instant the nose
dropped, my back and legs stiffened.
I literally stood on the rudder pedals,
trying reflexively to push myself back-
ward from the abyss that suddenly
yawned in front of me. There was no
room for thought. My instructor neat-
ly recovered the glider just as prom-
ised, and asked, “Would you like to do
the recovery on the next one? I’ll walk
you through it.” I’m pretty sure my in-
ternal voice said something along the
lines of, “Are you crazy?”
Talking it over with another flight
instructor some time later, I learned
that those physical reactions were the
hallmarks of a high sensitivity to a sud-
den drop in gravity. He pointed me to
Derek Piggott’s booklet on sensitivity
to low-g. (I’m not the only one, whew.)
In a nutshell, when the pull of gravity
is sharply reduced, my subconscious
mind insists I am falling and activates
a reflexive response. What’s that reflex
look like? Well, we stiffen and extend
our entire frame outward attempting
to reach anything to break the fall.
A bit like trying to become a human
starfish. Just like the drowning reflex,
it is literally impossible to break out of
the reflex chain to follow instructions
or perform some conscious action un-
til the perception of threat passes. Had
I encountered a spin for the first time
while flying on my own at low altitude,
I’d be dead.
I had to know how to execute a
standard spin recovery in order to
gain a glider pilot’s license. Stall and
spin recovery training
is important for all who
fly aircraft, but for those
of us highly sensitive to
low-g, it is critical. We
have to encounter the
sudden drop enough
times so that we no lon-
ger perceive it as an im-
mediate threat. Just like
any other maneuver, we
need to be able to calmly,
consciously respond,
“Oh, I’ve seen this be-
fore. XYZ is the action
for this situation.” The
kicker is that a person
may not even know he
or she has high sensitiv-
ity to low-g before expe-
Looking Over the Edge
aDVENTUrES aND
mISaDVENTUrES
BY CHRISTINA LARSON
Attempting to spin a Grob 103. (Photo from GoPro footage, by Christina Larson, 2017.)