There are two kinds of people: those who find spins exhilarating, and those who find them terrifying.
I found them exhilarating when my instructor, Betty Faux, first demonstrated them to me in a Cessna 150 during the course of my post-private-ticket training. I promptly invited friends to share this great thrill. We would fly out over the ocean, climb to 6,000 feet or so, and do spin after spin. It’s amazing they didn’t all barf. At the time I had no understanding whatever of the fact that to some people the sensations of a spin are quite frightening. You might replace “some people” in that sentence with “all rational people,” because it is really quite natural to experience some anxiety when you are thousands of feet up in the air, the little crate to which you have entrusted your life suddenly keels over into a rapidly gyrating vertical descent and a quick mental calculation reveals that you have about 15 seconds to live. But I was young and in love with flying, and the fact that you could get an airplane to do something so remote from straight-and-level flight, and that it would instantly, almost magically, recover on your command — why, this was absolutely intoxicating.
