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spin is a condition
where the aircraft
is pointing steeply
down. One wing is
deeply stalled and
very draggy, while
the other wing
is partly stalled, and flying around it.
This means the aircraft comes down in
a corkscrew motion with the airspeed
only a little faster than stall speed.
Right, that’s dealt with the
formalities. Now I am going tell you
about the bravest pilot in the world –
an Australian named Harry Hawker.
The same Hawker who’s company
later built the Hurricane, Hunter,
Sea Fury and that most beautiful
aircraft of all time – the Hart.
Let me take you back 100 years to
June 1914. Picture this: Hawker is
high above Brooklands in a Sopwith
Tabloid. His goggles keep blurring as
the freezing wind mixes with a mist
of hot castor-oil from the 100 hp
Gnome Monosoupape. His nostrils
are filled with its pungent smell,
which will at least make sure that his
bowl movements are regular. He is
shivering, possibly from the cold, butmore likely from the thought of what
he is about to do.
Hawker is deliberately going
to spin the aeroplane, and hopes
that his recovery plan will work.
History tells us that it will almost
certainly not work.
No one has ever deliberately
entered a spin and recovered before,
but Hawker thinks he can do it.
There have been many accidental
spins, and almost all ended in death.
In fact, spins were the biggest killer
of pilots. No one understood what
caused them or how to recover. You
were simply warned not to turn when
the airspeed was low – because the
spin god would grab you and hurl
you into the dirt.
But Hawker believed he had
worked out a way to recover and he
was prepared to bet his life on it.Harry’s first try
He started the spin by deliberately
running out of airspeed during
the entry to a loop. The aircraft
obediently dropped into the expected
gyration. Hawker allowed it to doa couple of turns and then put his
recovery plan into action.
It didn’t work! He spun all the
way down to the ground and crashed
into a forest which left him cut and
bruised, but alive.
While he was being patched up
in hospital he thought of another
method of recovery. So certain was
he that this would work, that two
days later he was again wiping the
castor oil off his goggles as he looked
down on the English countryside.
Two years earlier, Lt Wilfred
Parke, RN had accidentally spun an
Avro G over the Salisbury Plain. He
recovered by using opposite rudder.
Parke claimed he had found the
solution to the spinning problem.
Unfortunately, he had only got it
half right, and a month later he spun
a Hanley-Page monoplane into the
ground when he tried to turn back
following an engine failure after
take-off. He was killed.
Getting back to Hawker’s windy
cockpit. He believed that Parke had
been on to something when he used
opposite rudder. He believed that the
other secret ingredient to spin recoveryVIA JIM DAVISaustralianflying.com.auJanuary - February 2015 AUSTRALIAN FLYINGRefresh your pilot’s licence with this series of Master Class features written by author and veteran
instructor Jim Davis. Over the coming issues, Jim targets the skills that have gone rusty since
ab-initio training with a view to bringing them back into the cockpit.
MAIN: You’re spinning! And if
you don’t do something soon that
airport will get a lot bigger in the
windscreen!
LEFT: Shades of Harry Hawker: a
Sopwith Tabloid replica in a spin.STEVE HITCHEN