I can't locate the article, but I recall early in my training reading a story about an instructor and student who entered an inadvertent spin while practicing stalls. Aircraft can sometimes even recover on their own, such as the "cornfield bomber" which actually recovered itself after the pilot ejected. There are definitely instances where pilots have been able to recover from a flat spin though - one example being is the Piper Owner story Jay Carr pointed out. There is going to be a point for any aircraft where you simply don't have the control authority to recover though (absent something extreme like mounting JATO bottles to the wing and firing them opposite the direction of the spin to stop the rotation). The key to recovering from a flat spin is partly in the aircraft's design (aerobatic aircraft are built to handle "flatter" spins than normal aircraft and recover more readily), partly in the loading (specifically the location of the center of gravity), and partly in how "flat" the spin actually is. But from there it is still some way to the fully developed flat spin, and I would expect that a skilled pilot could recover from this momentary upset. Regarding the "Top Gun" scenario: If the F-14 is at high angle of attack and the jet wash hits it asymmetrically, the airplane could enter into a spin. Unfortunately, this can only be done long before take-off. One way to suppress these vortices is the placement of small spoiler strips along the nose (which fixes the vortex position and reduces this self-stabilizing effect), and another is to make the nose shape flatter. This is why a flat spin is self-stabilizing. A rotating fuselage tip at high angle of attack will produce vortices at its side, and the yawing moment of these vortices will grow stronger with increasing yawing motion. If you have a configuration which is prone to flat spins, you need to change the shape of the fuselage tip. With the damaged configuration (watch without sound for no distraction) you get a typical flat spin with the spin axis close to the center of gravity since there are few suction forces acting on most surfaces - only drag and the nose vortex (more on that below) remain. Depending on elevon settings, the spin axis is somewhere between the cockpit and the forward tip of the wing triangle.
Watch this movie of the spinning XB-70 to get an idea how it looks.
This difference in centrifugal force along the lengthwise coordinate of the aircraft pulls the aircraft in a near-horizontal attitude. All parts of the aircraft rotate with the same yaw rate, and the centrifugal force from this yawing motion grows linearly with distance from the spin axis.
In a flat spin the axis of rotation is even more back, close to the center of gravity. The axis of the spin rotation is close to the aircraft's nose, and the tail has the biggest distance from this axis. I guess I now need to explain the inertial moment which causes the high pitch attitude in some aircraft. Naturally stable flying wings never enter a flat spin their spin modes are all fairly steep due to the lack of a strong inertial moment from the lengthwise distribution of masses. With the lower inertial pitch-up moment, the elevator then has to be moved back to neutral, and the drag from wing and elevator is enough to pitch the aircraft fully down and out of the spin. They now can reduce the high yaw rate, which in turn reduces the high pitch-up moment of the rotating fuselage. At +70° it is almost in line with the airflow in a flat spin, and now the vertical tails are no longer in the wake of the elevator. You have to know that the elevator of the F-14 is a full-flying surface, and the movement range is from -20° to +70°.
They then studied the phenomenon at Pax River, and in the end Bill Bihrle found out that the elevator shields airflow from the two vertical tails of the F-14 when the stick is pushed, but moves out of the way when the stick is pulled full aft. Spinning the F-14Įarly on, the Navy lost several F-14s due to flat spins. As others have pointed out before, a flat spin can only be stopped by shifting the center of gravity forward or deploying a spin chute. Wings and horizontal surfaces are fully separated, and elevator deflection is mostly useless. In a flat spin, the forward fuselage dominates the aerodynamic forces, and we all know there are no control surfaces which could influence this flow. This is different from what you learn about regular spins, where pushing the stick would be a better recovery method. The F-14 is special to stop the flat spin you need to pull on the stick.