Deviated ladder lines?

[Temphage]

I'm making my way through the flight manual (only 9,000 pages to go!) while taking random flights in-game to play with what I learned and just to practice.

 

There's one thing I've come across that I'm not able to figure out, however. Oftentimes during flight, my HUD ladder lines crawl off to the left or right of the HUD, sometimes to the point that they're not even visible. Oftentimes the vector indicator will be with it, and I believe it's falsely indicating bad vector as even though it's pointing far off to the left or right of centerline, my ADI isn't showing any slip whatsoever. There's no yaw trim in play here, it just crawls away off the HUD.

 

 

 

Also why is my standby ADI *always* completely, ridiculously wrong?

[Kaiza]

The HUD ladder lines up with aircraft track, so what you are experiencing is a strong cross wind.

[Teeps]

Isn't the ladders going sideways indicating tat you're flying in a crosswind?

[Temphage]

Shouldn't my ADI be indicating slip then? The fact that the bead is dead-center is what confuses me the most about this.

[EtherealN]

No, it should not.

 

The slip ball indicates whether you are flying "clean" through the air, and flying in a crosswind does not mean you are slipping. What you are experiencing (I think) is a classic case of terrain/air confusion - we humans are very used to using the ground as our reference for movement, but when flying that's just not the case. You are moving through a volume of air that is also moving with respect to the ground. If the air moves perpendicular to your plane of motion, flying "straight and clean" through the air will cause you to drift with regards to the terrain.

 

This is one of the "bastards" when you go through navigation training at flight school, since even if you carry a computer you are expected to know how to calculate this manually (and preferably without a calculator too). Best way I found to think about it when I was in that situation was to just forget the ground - I'm not flying on the ground, I'm flying on moving terrain.

 

Below are two Windows Paint (oh yeah!) examples that I hope should indicate what happens, with the black boxes being the terrain. As you can see in them, if I want to reach the point at the end of the yellow lines I will need to set a course that corrects for the wind - in example one I need to set a course left of my waypoint, in number 2 right of it, in order to move the purple True Track such that it intersects my waypoint. This does not mean I need to sideslip - remember, sideslip only regards the air itself, for that you can completely forget about the terrain. You are compensating for the entire "road" moving, so to speak.

 

[Ninjaofdoom]

I've wondered about this as well. Good to know.

[Bluduh]

Make sure whatever rudder device you are using is properly centered and calibrated. This happened to me when my Saitek rudder pedals were properly centered, but I forgot to disable the "twist" rudder on my X-65F flight stick.

 

I was inadvertently "holding" some out-of-trim rudder on the stick, causing some side slip. I realize that being out-of -trim should show up on the slip ball, but I didn't notice it at the time.

 

Disabling the yaw on the flight stick fixed the problem. The field-of-view on the HUD is very narrow (maybe +/- 5 deg), so it doesn't take much side slip to push the pitch ladder/flight path marker way off to the side.

[Seanner]

Just to add to what EtherealN said, you'd be slipping in a crosswind when the pitch lines were CENTERED -- implying the crosswind isn't affecting your flight path. If you are flying straight ahead relative to your nose, yet air is moving sideways across your plane, then relatively speaking your plane is slipping opposite of this air.