Flight Testing - Airframe vs Personal Parachute

[WLIU]

I work with a gentleman who was the former chief designer at Piper. He tells me that spin chutes were mostly a failure in use. I understand that a number of anti-spin devices (small parachutes, rocket motors, etc) were tried and none were found to be reliable. Did not go into the specifics with him. The bottom line was that the Piper flight test staff wears parachutes and plans to exit the airplane if needed. For what it is worth, large scale RC models are used to do a lot of the pre-first flight evaluation of the potential spin characteristics of new designs. If you are really concerned about how your original design might perform, work the math to appropriately scale it down and build a flying model. I understand that Burt Rutan started that way.

Oh, and yes light twins are in fact spin tested. I have had some interesting and educational discussions about spin testing twins with my co-worker. But I do not suggest that you explore that topic in your own airplane.

Best of luck,

Wes
N78PS