Smokin Hole

I've noticed that takeoffs are so easy now that I wonder why my first few were so ugly. I now understand that I am noticing yaw, and correcting it, much faster now. Trim, no trim, full power, reduced, full RPM, 2700, flaps--none of them make a bit of difference. Its all about getting your feet to work again.

Nate, I mentioned over at SimHQ that I was noticing a performance difference between two nearly identical missions, the only difference being 5 Hips circling west of the battle area. I've played the two missions several times now and there is no significant noticeable difference. There is a performance loss when looking in the general direction of the battle area which is 42 miles from the plane. Since I was wrong about the Hips there is probably no point in looking into this further. But if you are still interested pick either mission. Even though they are MP they still work (ignore the WHs in the client selection list). Takeoff and fly 2-3 minutes, long enough to get you past Tiblisi and the first small lake. Looking west you should notice some performance loss. Nothing is in that direction (no towns, no airports) except the first units in the battle area well beyond visual range about 25 miles away. . MG Vaziani.rar

Well, I used to teach this stuff and I myself was taught by some very experience old salts. We may have had it wrong but what we were taught was this: The instability of conventional gear planes is mainly due to the CG location aft of the mains. This makes any drift tend to accelerate until corrected by the pilot. As a rough guide, that drift can be stopped with rudder, brakes or both until the CG passes laterally beyond the wheelbase. After that, again roughly, things have progressed too far for a recovery. If you throw brakes into the equation the wide wheelbase becomes an obvious advantage.

That's probably true. Non pilots like to use the term "seat of the pants" to describe how really good, natural pilots fly. But really there is no such thing. This would be the exception. Any time you are in a tailwheel and it is moving you must stop undesired yaw very early before it accelerates past your ability to limit it. It's a little like hovering a helicopter. But there is a difference that separates planes from the bike analogy. Tracking a conventional gear plane is a visual process. That is how its taught: find landmarks on either side of the nose and use those marks to sense yaw. Also, in light wind, the P-51 should, to my inexperienced mind, track fairly straight once the tail rises at 60-80. That vertical stab is very big. The wheel base is wider than practically anything else flying relative to size.

Many moons ago I pissed off the owner of the glider operation I flew for by taking off in his Maule M7 from a tail-up start. Mr. Maule himself got airborne before passing outside through the doors of his hangar by doing this. So of course I had to try it. Always best done with someone elses plane :-)

In the real plane the nose would go right into the dirt without the tail tied down. And I still think that the propwash around the vertical stab and rudder is either un- or undermodelled. [EDIT] OK I'll eat a little crow on that one. The nose will go right into the dirt unless you keep the MP below 40 inches (just like the book says). Propwash is definately modelled as can be seen by the rocking side to side when moving the rudder with the brakes set. But there is still something odd about the takeoff roll. It just seems too unstable. I've talked to people who have flown the P-51. I once had a friend who owned one briefly (too expensive). None of these people ever mentioned any yaw instability when the tail comes up. A big tailwheel airplane like this one should be fairly easy for anyone with time in smaller, squirrelier types.

Diffinately a very nice detail. One extremely small caveat is that when you sit up high enough to see yourself in the mirror, you are no longer black. But by bringing that up I put myself in the category of "rivet counters", a population of the sim community I've never taken seriously.

Although this won't be a problem when propwash is implemented.

That's been in the desert with the canopy open too long. Used and weathered is fine. But when they get that dirty its time for a new crew chief.

I would have to agree that much (especially propwash) does not yet appear to be modelled. That's the only thing that would explain the stick forward controllability of the plane. I've never flown a high performance classic fighter but I have flown some short coupled relatively unstable tailwheel planes. All responded quickly and predictably to either bursts of power or a small amount of differential braking.

I take back some of what I said above. After further testing I have to agree with SimFreak. The torque effect on takeoff seems a bit scripted to me. I have never flown a large tailwheel airplane but I have flown a handful of small ones. The tailwheel (lockable or not) doesn't add much to lateral stability after 20 - 30 knots. From that point the flow over the rudder and vertical stabilizer are doing all the work. But in the current P-51 Beta I think we are all holding the tailwheel down until a faily high speed of 70 plus because we've learned that letting the tailwheel up naturally sends the plane darting off one direction or another. If the plane really did "want" to do that, it would do regardless of whether the tailwheel was on the ground or not. Also, I can almost completely eliminate this directional control issue by using 1 notch of flaps. Why would 10 - 15 degrees of flaps make the plane so much more controllable as the tail comes up? Finally, gyroscopic precession is weak. In most low performance planes I have flown it was perhaps even stronger than the P-51. Shouldn't 1500 HP swinging 11 feet of prop do a little more? Full power, low speed go arounds result in the most gentle left roll when we know from material posted elsewhere on this forum were very difficult to control and often killed inexperienced pilots. I don't want to make an idiot of myself as I know (or at least assume) that P-51 pilots have tested the FM. Conversely, I've never gotten closer than 10 feet to a Mustang. And I also understand that it was a pretty easy plane to fly compared to its contemporaries. But the OP has a point. This one is really easy in places where I would have expected more difficulty (his loop for instance). And difficult where I would have expected none, such as when allowing the tail to fly itself off durning takeoff (with flaps up).

Maybe. But not certainly. Coordination is primarily to overcome adverse yaw and you can't deny that there is plenty of that. Any yaw encountered in a loop would be due to torque and other left turning tendancies. When you are trimmed and entering the maneuver at speed not much is going to change unless you really crank back or get slow. The gyroscopic forces are very apparent. You only need to watch your plane from behind with F2 and push or pull hard at a high power setting.

Forget the Mustang. That article was awsome! More idiotic behavior occurs during go-arounds than any other phase of flight. Thanks for sharing!

Engine Quits After Droptanks Dropped I still had fuel remaining in the left main tank (the selected tank) when I dropped the external tanks. Immediately the engine quit. The odd thing is that I still had control over manifold pressure. The pressure at the time of failure was 50 psi and I initially could raise and lower the pressure all the way up to 50 psi using the throttle. However no power was produced and the engine was obviously dead. As the plane decelerated in the glide the pressure reduced to about 30 and thats when I hit the weeds. Planes I have flown with manifold pressure guages have always indicated outside air pressure when the engine is shutdown and something less when the engine is windmilling as the cylinders continue to suck pressure from the manifold. EDIT: For clarity, my thread was merged with this. Otherwise it looks like I don't know how to read. Also, it occurs to me that the continued high MP might be attributable to the supercharger but that wouldn't explain why moving the throttle would change MP.

This doesn't work for me. As soon as I return to the game the full force, non-centering controls resume.

I've had it too. But once I changed it the second time, it stuck. Good report. I'd forgotten about it.

Well my instrument/ME instructor career ended many years back. But I still hold the tickets to remind myself that life is safer now. No my students were rarely bad. They just shared my lack of interest in the magic behind some of the systems. To us (use your Tarzan accent here): Suction = good, vacuum failure = bad. I was a kid then. Now I am always happy to learn more.

The OP has explained this effect so well that I hesitate to doubt him. I can only say that I have never noticed this behavior in gyro equipped plane before. Having said that, the oldest instrument equipped airplane I have ever flown was a 1965 Beechcraft Baron. It had a black-on-black AI and so LOOKED like the horizon in the P-51 but perhaps it functioned differently. What it definitely did not do was the behavior described above. We commonly taught steep turns with 45-60 degrees of bank and a hard reversal on the original heading after 360 degrees of turn. The AI was always solid. And the reason we do racetrack patterns is because there is no way to circle along a fixed course. Edit: I think, Fred, that you are stating that one must be in a sustained constant turn for a very long time before the gyro "corrects" itself in this manner. Something that a pilot flying on instruments would never do since there is never a need to turn past 270 degrees. If true that is quite something to learn after holding a CFII for 25 years.

The P-51 also runs worse than A-10 around airfields on my PC. Other P-51's in my view bring me down to near slide-show levels.

It runs worse for me. As a benchmark I use the black shark mission, "Battle". I added overcast and snow. In that mission A-10 runs best, BS same or slightly slower, P-51 slower still and the Su25t is a slug, especially with the Skhval on.

Why DO they have to be so big? Rise of Flight skins are 5.3 MB. I set up a mission where my single ship forms with a flight of 4 p-51's. It was a slideshow when 4 planes were in view even though 3 and 4 were quite distant in a loose finger four. This is just unnecessary IMO.

Wow! How cool was that. Nice Wags.

I handles great. But like all planes it gets mushy as you get slow. If you find it unresponsive then you are very close to stall. As for spin recovery I found that it responds well to traditional inputs. But remember that the throttle needs to be at idle. Any throttle will only flatten and tighten the spin and make recovery slow.

A locked tailwheel isn't necessarily locked outright. Many incorporate a spring into the locking mechanism. This protects the tailwheel from mechanical failure if stressed. If you have the stick in your gut but still insist on a sharp turn with differential braking, the tailwheel will turn past 6 degrees. At least untill you track straight for a meter or two to pop it back into its lock.

The thing to remember about tailwheels/tailskids is this: they are inherently unstable. In a nosewheel airplane, the CG is in front of the mains. This means that the mass of the airplane is always working to point the nose down the direction of travel. A "conventional gear" airplane will always have the CG behind the mains. Any tendency away from the current ground track will accelerate until corrected. The P51D, if we are to believe the manual, is even more aft which will only exagerrate the instability.