14 CFR 61.183(i)(1) requires every flight instructor applicant seeking an airplane or glider rating to hold a logbook endorsement stating that they are competent and possess instructional proficiency in stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin recovery procedures, after receiving flight training in those areas in an airplane certificated for spins. Not competent to recover. Competent to teach.
We run that training in the Diamond DA20-C1, which is operated in the utility category and approved for intentional spins. The course is $2,000 and covers three hours of aircraft time, two hours in the Redbird MCX full-motion simulator and classroom instruction, ending in the endorsement. It is available as a standalone course to instructor candidates training anywhere, and it sits alongside our CFI requirements ladder for candidates training here.
What The Regulation Actually Says
Read 61.183(i) carefully, because two details in it decide how you should plan your training.
61.183(i)(1) requires the endorsement, and it requires that the flight training behind it was given in an airplane or glider certificated for spins. Most of the American training fleet is not. A normal-category trainer with no spin approval in its flight manual cannot be used for this, regardless of what anybody is willing to sign.
61.183(i)(2) is the part that explains why most CFI checkrides contain no spin. An examiner may accept the 61.183(i)(1) endorsement as satisfactory evidence of instructional proficiency in stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin recovery. But if you are retesting after a failure caused by deficiencies in your knowledge or skill in stall or spin instructional procedures, the examiner must test you on those procedures in an airplane certificated for spins.
In other words: the endorsement is not a way around learning this. It is a way to avoid spinning an airplane with an examiner on board on a first attempt. Fail that part of the ride and the spin comes back, in the airplane, with the examiner.
The Parachute Question
Pilots ask about this constantly. 14 CFR 91.307(c) provides that unless each occupant is wearing an approved parachute, no pilot carrying any person other than a crewmember may execute an intentional maneuver exceeding 60 degrees of bank or 30 degrees of nose-up or nose-down attitude. 91.307(d) then excepts flight tests for pilot certification or rating, and spins and other flight maneuvers required by the regulations for any certificate or rating when given by a certificated flight instructor or by an airline transport pilot instructing under 61.67.
Spin training given by a CFI for the 61.183(i) endorsement falls squarely inside that exception. No parachutes are required, and we do not use them.
Instructional Proficiency Is A Higher Bar Than Recovery
Almost every commercial pilot can recover from a spin if one is entered and they are expecting it. The standard in 61.183(i)(1) is different in three ways, and the course is built around them.
- You must be able to demonstrate it while narrating. Talking through an entry and a recovery while flying it is meaningfully harder than flying it silently, and it is what you will do for the rest of your instructing career.
- You must be able to recover from a botched one. Your future students will apply the wrong control at the wrong moment. You need to have seen an aggravated entry, a delayed recovery and a spin that starts to accelerate, and to have taken control cleanly from a seat that is not the one you learned in.
- You must be able to teach the avoidance. The point of spin training is not recovery. It is that your students never get there. Stall awareness, the uncoordinated base-to-final turn, the distracted go-around, the skidding turn back to the field: these are the lessons, and the spin is the demonstration that makes them stick.
What A Spin Is, In Terms You Will Have To Teach
A spin is an aggravated stall that results in autorotation. Both wings are stalled, but one is more deeply stalled than the other. The less-stalled wing produces more lift and less drag, so the airplane rolls and yaws toward the more-stalled wing and descends in a corkscrew path around a vertical axis. Two conditions are required and both must be present: the wing must be stalled and yaw must be present. Remove either and the spin cannot continue.
That last sentence is the entire lesson, and every student explanation you will ever give comes back to it.
| Phase | What is happening | What you teach |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | The airplane is stalled with yaw present, from a skid, a slip, aileron input at the stall, or rudder misuse. | Recognition of the conditions that cause it, long before the airplane departs. |
| Incipient | The first turn or two. Attitude and rotation rate are still changing and the spin is not yet stable. | Most inadvertent spins are caught here. Prompt, correct recovery input is everything. |
| Developed | Rotation rate, airspeed and vertical speed have stabilized. | What a stable spin looks and feels like, and why the airspeed indicator is not the instrument to watch. |
| Recovery | The wing is unstalled and rotation stops. | The manufacturer's published procedure, applied in the correct order. |
Spin Versus Spiral Dive
An examiner will ask you to distinguish them, and a student will one day confuse them. In a spin the wings are stalled, airspeed is low and roughly constant, and the rotation rate is stable. In a spiral dive the wings are not stalled, airspeed is increasing rapidly, and the G loading is building. Applying spin recovery inputs to a spiral dive at increasing airspeed is how airplanes are overstressed. Teaching the difference is part of the endorsement.
Where Inadvertent Spins Actually Happen
This is the part of the course that changes how people fly, and it is worth setting out before the recovery technique, because the recovery is the least important thing on this page.
Spins do not usually begin in the practice area at 4,000 feet with somebody expecting them. They begin low, in the pattern or shortly after takeoff, in three situations that every instructor sees repeatedly.
- The skidding turn from base to final. A pilot overshoots the extended centerline, does not want to steepen the bank because it feels uncomfortable that close to the ground, and adds rudder to bring the nose round instead. The airplane is now slow, uncoordinated and descending. If the wing stalls in that condition it will drop toward the inside of the turn, and there is no altitude to recover in. This is the classic fatal pattern accident, and it is the reason coordination is taught as a safety item rather than a comfort item.
- The distracted go-around. Full power applied at low speed with the nose already high produces a large yawing moment, and a pilot who is looking out at the airplane that caused the go-around rather than at the airplane they are flying may not correct it. Power plus yaw plus a high angle of attack is the same recipe.
- The turn back after an engine failure on departure. A low-altitude, low-airspeed turn flown by somebody who is frightened. Everything that makes a spin possible is present at once, and the altitude available is measured in seconds.
Teaching a student to recognize those three situations before they develop is worth more than any amount of recovery practice, and it is what the instructional proficiency standard in 61.183(i)(1) is really about. Once you have felt how little uncoordinated rudder it takes to make an airplane depart, at a speed that looked perfectly safe, you teach the base-to-final turn differently for the rest of your career.
The Recovery
The widely taught memory aid is PARE: Power to idle, Ailerons neutral, Rudder full opposite to the rotation, Elevator briskly forward to break the stall. Hold until rotation stops, then neutralize the rudder and recover from the dive without overstressing the airplane.
The important caveat, and one you must teach as firmly as the mnemonic itself, is that the manufacturer's published spin recovery procedure in the airplane flight manual is authoritative. PARE is a generalized procedure. The flight manual for the specific airplane you are flying is the rule. Read it, and teach your students to read theirs.
Why The Diamond DA20-C1
The DA20-C1 is a two-seat, low-wing composite trainer with a 125 horsepower Continental IO-240, a Garmin 430, a control stick rather than a yoke, and a bubble canopy. Operated in the utility category it is approved for intentional spins, and it is a good airplane to learn them in for reasons beyond the paperwork.
- Visibility. The bubble canopy means you can see the rotation against the horizon and the ground clearly, which is what makes the incipient phase teachable rather than merely survivable.
- Honest behavior. It enters and recovers predictably, which lets the lesson be about technique instead of about the airplane.
- Side-by-side seating. You can see what your student's hands and feet are doing, which matters enormously when the lesson is about not applying the wrong control.
- The stick. Elevator and aileron inputs are more visible to an instructor than yoke inputs, which is useful when you are diagnosing why a student's recovery was slow.
Full details are on our Diamond DA20-C1 page. Always confirm the specific airplane's approval and its published spin recovery procedure in its own flight manual before flight.
What A Spin Lesson Looks Like From The Right Seat
Because the standard is instructional proficiency, the aircraft sessions are structured as lessons you are giving rather than maneuvers you are flying.
Each flight starts on the ground with you delivering the preflight briefing: what we are going to do, why, what the airplane will do, what the recovery is, what the hard floor is, and what the signal is for taking control. Your instructor will sit as a student and ask the question a student would ask, which is usually some version of what happens if it does not stop.
In the air you clear the area properly, climb to an altitude that allows a full recovery with a wide margin, and then talk while you fly. You demonstrate an entry and narrate what is happening as it happens. You recover and narrate that too. Then you hand over, watch somebody else do it imperfectly on purpose, and decide whether to correct verbally or take control. Deciding when to take control is the skill being trained, and it is the one that cannot be learned from a book.
The debrief afterwards is longer than the flight. Expect to be asked to explain, on a whiteboard, why the airplane did what it did, and to redraw it when the first explanation does not land. That is the checkride, run early.
The Course
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Price | $2,000 |
| Aircraft time | 3 hours in the Diamond DA20-C1, utility category, approved for intentional spins |
| Full-motion simulator | 2 hours in the Redbird MCX |
| Classroom instruction | Included |
| Outcome | The 14 CFR 61.183(i)(1) logbook endorsement, on satisfactory completion |
| Who it is for | Flight instructor candidates, including those training at other schools |
| Parachutes | Not required; 14 CFR 91.307(d) excepts spins required by the regulations when given by a CFI |
A typical course runs across two or three days. The classroom session comes first and covers the aerodynamics, the regulation, the recovery procedure and the lesson plan you will eventually teach from. The simulator sessions let you see entries and recoveries, including badly handled ones, without burning aircraft time or altitude. The aircraft sessions build from stall awareness through incipient spins to developed spins and recoveries, and finish with you demonstrating and narrating from the right seat.
The endorsement is given when you meet the standard, not when the hours run out. If you need a fourth aircraft hour, DA20 time is $229 per hour at the package rate plus $110 for the instructor. You can book the spin training course online, or call us to schedule it around the rest of your instructor training.
Spin Awareness If You Are Not Becoming An Instructor
You do not have to be a CFI candidate to take this. Private and commercial pilots who have never seen a spin routinely tell us afterwards that the most valuable part was not the recovery but the entries: watching how little uncoordinated rudder it takes, at what looks like a safe airspeed, to make an airplane depart. Once you have felt a skidding turn start to break, you never fly a base-to-final turn the same way again.
If you want spin awareness rather than the full endorsement course, call and we will scale it. Upset and stall awareness also pairs well with a flight review.
Safety, And What We Will Not Do
Spin training is done in an airplane approved for it, within weight and balance limits and within the utility category envelope, at an altitude that allows a full recovery with a large margin, clear of cloud and clear of other traffic, after a thorough clearing turn and a briefed abort. We do not do intentional spins in airplanes that are not approved for them. We do not sign an endorsement for a candidate who cannot demonstrate and narrate the recovery. We do not teach aerobatics, and this course is not an aerobatic course.
Related Reading
- CFI requirements — every requirement in 14 CFR 61.183, in the order you meet them.
- CFI training cost and timeline — where the spin course sits in the four-week program.
- CFI ACS and PTS explained — how slow flight, stalls and spins are tested now.
- Diamond DA20-C1 — specifications and performance for the airplane you will fly.
- Complex and high-performance endorsements — the other endorsements we teach.
- Flight instructor (CFI) course in Los Angeles — the full instructor program.
CFI Spin Endorsement FAQ
Do I Need A Spin Endorsement To Become A CFI?
Yes, for a flight instructor certificate with an airplane or glider rating. 14 CFR 61.183(i)(1) requires a logbook endorsement stating you are competent and possess instructional proficiency in stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin recovery, after training in an airplane or glider certificated for spins.
Will I Have To Spin The Airplane On My CFI Checkride?
Usually not. 14 CFR 61.183(i)(2) allows the examiner to accept your endorsement as satisfactory evidence. The exception is a retest after a failure caused by deficiencies in stall or spin instructional procedures, where the examiner must test you in an airplane certificated for spins.
How Much Does Spin Training Cost?
Our spin training course is $2,000 and covers three hours in the Diamond DA20-C1, two hours in the full-motion simulator and classroom instruction, ending in the 61.183(i) endorsement.
Why Does It Have To Be A Spin-Approved Airplane?
Because 14 CFR 61.183(i)(1) says so: the training must be given in an airplane or glider certificated for spins. Most normal-category trainers are not approved for intentional spins, and no endorsement can change that.
Do We Wear Parachutes?
No. 14 CFR 91.307(d) excepts spins and other flight maneuvers required by the regulations for a certificate or rating when given by a certificated flight instructor from the parachute requirement in 91.307(c).
What Is The PARE Recovery?
Power idle, ailerons neutral, rudder full opposite to the rotation, elevator briskly forward to break the stall. It is a generalized memory aid. The manufacturer's published procedure in the airplane flight manual is authoritative and takes precedence.
How Long Does The Course Take?
Typically two or three days, built around a classroom session, two simulator sessions and three flights. It can be scheduled around the rest of your instructor training or taken on its own.
Can I Take Spin Training If I Am Not Becoming An Instructor?
Yes. Private and commercial pilots take it for stall and spin awareness. Call and we will scale the course to what you want from it rather than to the endorsement requirement.
Book Spin Training At Van Nuys
Spin training is $2,000 and available to instructor candidates from any school. You can book it here, book a free consultation to talk it through first, or call (818) 330-1318 any day from 9 AM to 9 PM. If you are earlier in the path and simply curious about flying, a discovery flight is $229 for 60 minutes and logs as dual instruction. We are at 7900 Balboa Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91406, on Van Nuys Airport.