To become a CFI, you must be trained in spin entry and recovery. The theory is that you should have some experience recovering from spins in case a student puts you into a spin during training. I suppose that makes sense, but that didn't make me any happier about doing it. Generally, my fear of heights doesn't bother me when I'm flying. But when I'm doing stalls, it seems to get to me. It really comes down to whether I'm looking straight ahead or if I'm looking all around while doing the stall. If I'm looking straight ahead, I always feel like I'm in a much steeper attitude than I really am (like 45 degrees or something). Reality is that in a power on stall, 15 degrees is about it, unless you just yank it up hard. In a power off stall it's even less. But again, that didn't help my nerves when we went out to do spin training.
We used a Cessna 152, which is incredibly forgiving and takes work to put into a spin. We spent most of the flight getting up to altitude. Once we got to about 5,000 ft, we did a power off stall, and just as it started to stall, kicked in full left rudder. Over we go and about .75 seconds later we're in a steep dive. Not much of a spin. Maybe a half turn. The "recovery" was letting off the rudder. So we climbed back up to altitude and did the same thing to the right. I remembered to hold the rudder in a little longer this time so we got about 2/3 of a turn. Then we flew home.
Less than 45 minutes in the air and about two minutes of it was spent in stalling, spinning and recovering the plane. The rest was flying to the practice area, climbing to altitude, and flying home.
I'm planning on taking some acrobatic training one day. Maybe I'll get to do some good spins then...
