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During initial flight training a lot of emphasis is placed on stalls and spins and how to recover from them, but is it possible to recover from a fully developed spin in an airliner? Do these large aircraft have enough rudder authority to pull it off?
Has it ever been done? And is it part of the training for specific type ratings? (in a simulator of course)
There were a lot of other mitigating factors in the Colgan Air 3407 crash. Was that one recoverable? It depends. It never should have got to the point of a stall in the first place. It was more preventable than recoverable.
But in answer to your question, again, it depends. Every aircraft in the air can stall and be recovered, if responded to properly. But the plane may very well bend and break if the stall develops too far. Then it may not be recoverable. And most large airliners (or aircraft bigger than a few thousand pounds with multiple engines) aren't designed for the stresses of spins, so they never teach to a full stall. In those types of aircraft a full stall is much more dangerous, and they can be much more difficult to recover from, especially if you break something. Besides, in aircraft like that, you should receive plenty of direct warning long before you reach the point of a stall.
When I was teaching, stalls and spins were one of my favorite subjects for early pilots. Especially in light trainers like the Cessna 150/152s. Those aircraft were always incredibly good at stalls/spins and incredibly forgiving. You can put a Cessna into a hands-off full stall if you trim it right, and it will stop rotating in a spin if you simply let go of it (and have enough altitude). I always taught my students spin recovery from a full spin, even at the Private Pilot level. And usually shortly after teaching them full stalls. I would stall it, make it rotate at least 3 or 4 times, and have them recover the spin. Then have them do it themselves. I never had to worry about my students not knowing how to recover from an unintentional stall/spin. By the time my students were learning to fly multis, I was teaching them more stall recognition and avoidance than recovery. Recovery is essentially the same in all aircraft. You just have to be sure to not reach that point.
There's only one thing you really need with any aircraft in a stall/spin, and that's altitude. Unfortunately, takeoffs and landings are the most likely places for you to get behind the aircraft and let it unintentionally stall/spin. That's why you learn how to recognize them very early in your pilot training. You can't spin without a stall first, and just about any airplane will give you fair warning before you stall it. The trick is recognizing the situation before it becomes serious.
In the sixties a Sabena Caravelle VIN entered a flat spin during a training flight. The crew demonstated stall recovery in different configurations when the plane entered into a spin by accident. The instructor saved the aicraft by pulling the brakechute after configuration changes showed no result (the Caravelle VIN had no reverses on the RR Avons but was equiped with a brake parachute in the tailcone). The yaw decreased and the tail was pulled up enough to unstall the wing.The wing had only TE-flaps and no LE-slats.
Yes they will spin.
They appear to have enough rudder authority - big twins have a lot, for engine-out reasons, but I don't know the aerodynamics well enough to state that it's certain to be enough, good question.
No, they have not been spun during test or for training. No, type-ratings don't include spin recovery, just stall recovery in simulators (including FBW types which have to be degraded first to allow them to stall) and recently recovery from unusual attitudes.
Simulators can't generally be used to train anything involving sustained yaw because the physical limitations make it impossible to accurately reproduce the feel. They are not built or approved to model accurately anything outside the approval requirement, which doesn't include spins, so while my large aircraft type's sim spins quite nicely ( I do it quite often, for fun, 'after hours' there's no guarantee, proof or reason to expect that the real aircraft would spin in the same way or be as recoverable.
Swept wing aircraft are equipped with yaw dampers to keep the aircraft in coordinated flight since swept wing aircraft are more susceptible to Dutch Roll (you can look up that term).
An American Airlines A300 lost its entire tail and spun out of control departing New York in 2001 as a result of a pilot using too much rudder pressure to (over) respond to what he thought was a wake turbulence encounter.
I'm no engineer, but if an airliner can exceed it maximum design limit on the vertical tail and lose the tail as a result of using too much rudder pressure, logic tells me that the vertical tails are absolutely not designed to take the stress of any kind of excessive rudder input (like you'd use for spin recovery), and in fact, the tail just rips off when you get sideways. (Note that Airbus aircraft have composite tails and there is a known issue with the A300 model having overly sensitive rudder pedals- and the pilot used A TON of pressure on the rudder pedal).
Swept wing aircraft are susceptible to dutch roll. Recovering from a spin in a swept wing aircraft? Well, it's kind of like a low altitude spin in a small airplane... if you didn't do your job as a pilot to prevent the approach to stall and ensuing stall... you missed your chance and you're done.
Big airplanes of the jet types have what is called stick shakers to warn pilots of an approaching stall and a stick pusher to initiate a recovery. In training with jets most pilots do 100% of there training in simulators and then make three takeoff's and landings in the airplane.
T tail airplanes may not be able to recover from stalls if the airplane get into a deep stall because airflow over the tail is blocked by the airplane and the elevator becomes ineffective.
