The chief test pilot of the Mig-25 was killed in a spin while turning onto final. Fuel gauges were registering nearly 0 fuel while his aircraft in reality was fully fueled. Turned with airspeed far too low.
Are jets more prone or less prone to spins than prop aircraft? In the video of the catastrophic 747 flight out of Afghanistan, it can be seen beginning to spin.
Jets aren't more or less prone to spin, however swept wing aircraft and aircraft with airfoils designed for high speeds (transonic or supersonic) can have stall and spin characteristics that are very different from slower straight-wing aircraft. Specifically, planes with swept wings may under some conditions enter a deep stall condition where much of the wing is stalled yet the plane "feels" like it is still flying. Control effectiveness may be lost in varying degrees, and pitch authority may be lost to the point where the pilot can't force the nose down to decrease angle of attack to break the stall. At that point any yaw or disruption in relative wind could snap the plane into a spin with little or no warning. Also, spin characteristics may be dramatically different in high performance fighter aircraft because of how the center of gravity and center of pressure may swap relative positions when a certain angle of attack is exceeded. This may make a plane statically and dynamically "stable" in the stalled or spinning condition, and there may not be enough control authority to get the plane out of the stall or spin.
Still, an airliner or even a large military transport is typically designed with more stability margin than that, even if the airfoil and aerodynamics are optimized for cruise efficiency or load carrying ability. In the case of the 747 that crashed after takeoff in Afghanistan, the reports indicated there was a massive rearward shift of very heavy cargo which made the plane completely uncontrollable. Build a flyable paper airplane and then attach about 20 paperclips to the tail, and see how well it flies... That's pretty much what happened to that 747.
The F-15E was initially more prone to spinning than the F-15A/B/C/D due to increased stabilator effectiveness at higher angles of attack and the LANTIRN pods being mounted ahead of the center of gravity. The flight controls had to be modified to make it harder to get it to spin. As a result the F-15E could be very aggressively maneuvered in conditions that would make an F-15C go out of control, because of the revised flight control laws. A well-flown F-15C could pull off maneuvers impossible in an F-15E, but an F-15E could be flown on the edge at will, with almost no risk of spinning. But once an F-15E entered a spin (it was still possible to get into one), it took just as long to get out of it as it did for an F-15C. The fact that it was a jet fighter with conventional delta wing configuration didn't make it inherently more or less prone to spinning, and in fact it was a very forgiving plane to fly as long as you knew what it could and could not do and didn't force it into an out of control situation.
The T-37, another forgiving jet aircraft, was actually modified to make it more spinnable and harder to get out of a spin once one was entered. This was deliberate, to force students to learn how to think under pressure and to make them learn how to apply specific procedures to get out of the spin. This was originally done because of the fairly poor post-departure behavior of the fighter aircraft in use at the time the T-37 entered service. Modern fighters recover from departures pretty much "hands off", and it shouldn't surprise anyone that the USAF's current primary trainer the T-6 recovers from spins by simply neutralizing the controls, which is not much different from a true "hands off" recovery procedure. Still, the F-15 does have one departure mode called an "auto-roll" which is a fairly nasty departure if the pilot isn't prepared for it. The recovery procedure from an auto-roll is very very specific, calling for smooth rudder input opposite of the roll direction and holding the stick slightly aft of neutral. If this procedure isn't followed precisely, the plane can *snap* out of the roll into an extreme nose-down pitching moment, which results in about negative 6 G's, causing significant aircraft damage and potentially some injury to the crew. The spin recovery procedure for the F-15 is also very specific, so much so that if the plane recognizes the spin, every display on the plane including the HUD changes mode to show spin recovery procedures. It shows a large arrow showing the pilot what direction to put the control stick, and even tells the pilot to pull one engine to idle and put the other one into full military (non-afterburning) power. The T-37 spin training was designed to prepare a fighter pilot for the unique specific recovery procedures. The T-6 spin recovery is taught in the same way mentally as a "boldface" procedure to be learned and executed flawlessly without hesitation, however it isn't very difficult and is arguably not as good training for a pilot destined to fly some of the older aircraft in the inventory.
I preferred the T-37 to the T-6, because it was really hard to break the T-37 or lose control so badly that it became uncontrollable. I could take a T-37 right to every single edge of the performance envelope with full confidence that I could hit every single edge and corner of that envelope without risking loss or damage to the aircraft. In the T-6, hitting or crossing some of those same envelope boundaries can cause significant damage to the engine or plane, so even the instructors rarely get a good feel for how the plane flies at its limits. It's just too risky to really learn the limits of the T-6, so instructors are positively discouraged from stepping outside the boundaries defined by syllabus maneuvers. In the T-37 though, it was fair game for an instructor to go find out what would happen if a student made any particular error and flipped the plane outside of the performance envelope. Really learning how to fly the plane at its limits made for safer and more effective instructors. With the T-6, instructors have to intervene much sooner when a student deviates from specific maneuver performance parameters, so the student never gets to find out what happens when he pushes the plane too far. A new USAF pilot today may be in a $100 million aircraft the first time he actually loses control without an instructor to intervene, which is kind of scary to think about in my opinion. The chance to foul it up and regain control without instructor intervention has been eliminated from pilot training with the switch from the T-37 to the T-6.
