I also require my students to at least recover from the incipient stage of a spin before they solo. If the airplane allows though (usually gyro issues) we do fully developed spins so they get the experience. None have told me so far that they thought it was a wasted training excercise. Its one thing to watch videos and talk about it, and quite another to actually do it.

Who do you think would react quickly and be less likely to panic in the even of a windshear, wake turbulence, or other unusual attitude encounter if they found themselves more inverted than upright? I think the aerobatic pilot — the guy who’s been there before — would respond properly. The pilot who’s never seen that attitude before would be less likely to respond properly.

Keep in mind that in your G1000 Skyhawk, being inverted probably means charts, pens, flight bags, cups, Jepp books, jackets, dirt from the carpet, and other items are now flying around the cockpit, and the belts, which were not designed to hold you inverted, are allowing you to fall toward the ceiling more than you’d like. It’s a panic-prone scenario, especially when its advent is unexpected.

In addition, your aerobatic flying experience has certainly engendered a greater understanding of aerodynamics and a better overall control feel for the aircraft. You’d be surprised how many pilots don’t have much of a feel for the airplane’s energy state.

I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that aerobatic and/or spin training makes a pilot some sort of superman. Far from it. As always, flight safety is mostly a matter of quality PIC decision making. But based on my own experiences an a pilot and instructor, I find a higher quality of aviating and understanding from those who’ve had acro experience.

I always teach them about the many factors which affect spin characteristics and recoverability. CG location, prop gyroscopics, control surface size and range, power, and so on. Even among aerobatic airplanes, spins can be unrecoverable if the CG is too far aft, power is left in, improper recovery technique is used, etc. Even an idle RPM stop which is too high can prevent spin recovery.

I make the point that they’re only going to see normal, power off, upright spins. There are many spin modes. Inverted, flat, upright, crossover, accelerated, and so on. The basic spin training is not meant to be permission to spin airplanes on their own, even though spinning approved airplanes doesn’t legally require any further training.

I wasn’t aware of the spin statistic showing that spin trained pilots don’t have a better safety record than non-trained pilots. I can only think of a couple of reasons for this. One might be that the spin training is poor. The other would be that spin trained pilots are doing intentional spins, whereas those without the training are not, so it’s natural that the spin trained pilots would have a higher accident rate since they’re the only ones doing them intentionally.

Think of it this way: single engine pilots probably have a better multi-engine accident rate than multi-rated pilots. But that’s a statistical inaccuracy. Non-multi-rated pilots don’t fly multi-engine airplanes, so it only makes sense that their accident rate would be an impressive-looking zero.

I make spin training an option for student pilots, yet I’ve had multi-engine students who had previously undergone spin training who were unconvinced that entering a spin in a multi-engine aircraft would be at all dangerous. Some of them seemed convinced that they could get any aircraft out of a spin. While I like your suggestion about finding the right instructor and the appropriate airplane. I just hope that those instructors who specialize in spin training are stressing that, depending on the aircraft, intentional spins can be deadly, or in the case of the Cirrus, very expensive.