Word.ws English Dictionary

defensive spiral

defensive spiral noun: a last-resort defensive maneuver in dogfighting used by an aircraft with critically-low kinetic energy, consisting of a rolling scissors performed straight down, using gravity to supply the kinetic energy needed to continue maneuvering, while attempting to either slow down enough to get behind the attacker or else trick the attacker into crashing into the ground.

defensive spiral: a last-resort defensive maneuver in dogfighting used by an aircraft with critically-low kinetic...
Image: United States Navy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

defensive spiral (plural defensive spirals)

  1. A last-resort defensive maneuver in dogfighting used by an aircraft with critically-low kinetic energy, consisting of a rolling scissors performed straight down, using gravity to supply the kinetic energy needed to continue maneuvering, while attempting to either slow down enough to get behind the attacker or else trick the attacker into crashing into the ground.

Forms of defensive spiral

pluraldefensive spirals

Questions about defensive spiral

What does defensive spiral mean?
Defensive spiral means a last-resort defensive maneuver in dogfighting used by an aircraft with critically-low kinetic energy, consisting of a rolling scissors performed straight down, using gravity to supply the kinetic energy needed to continue maneuvering, while attempting to either slow down enough to get behind the attacker or else trick the attacker into crashing into the ground.
What part of speech is defensive spiral?
Defensive spiral is a noun.
What is the plural of defensive spiral?
The plural of defensive spiral is defensive spirals.

Words near defensive spiral in the dictionary

  1. defensive lines of scrimmage
  2. defensive medicine
  3. defensive midfielder
  4. defensive midfielders
  5. defensive programming
  6. defensive spiral
  7. defensive spirals
  8. defensive tackle
  9. defensive tackles
  10. defensive wound
  11. defensive wounds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: defensive spiral (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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