Andy Jones remembers some spinning incidents
    As Hawker Siddeley Kingston was in fierce competition with the Alphajet, whose proponents were reputedly telling would-be customers that the Hawk programme was in difficulty over spinning, it was decided that it would be a good idea to demonstrate the opposite by spinning the aircraft in full public view at the SBAC show. For the exercise to be visible we needed a smoke pod and a suitable tank was fitted to the centre station. To get in a ten turn spin plus recovery from 10,000 ft the spin needed to be the high rotation rate type, which could be achieved by feeding in full out-spin aileron as the spin developed. The resulting spin could become a bit oscillatory but it worked well enough on the day. I think I only managed it a few times because of the weather at Farnborough that year but the pictures appeared in all the usual aviation magazines and the comments from the French subsided. Not long afterwards I repeated the exercise in a flight from Dunsfold. I can’t remember the reason but I do remember the result; the spin abruptly became violently oscillatory and then transmogrified into an inverted spin whereupon the engine surged. It was rather fortunate that it was at a greater height than it would have been at Farnborough. There would not have been enough height to recover; the French would have been over the moon!