Too Much Yaw

[cfelix]

Hi,

Lately I've noticed that all of my aircraft seem to have an excessive amount of yaw when I bank the plane even with no rudder applied. I use CH rudder pedals and have the auto-coordianate realism setting turned off. Any ideas?

Charlie

[lnuss]

Depending on the aircraft type, it may be a "normal" happening. If the yaw is opposite the direction that you apply ailerons, and if it mostly goes away when you center the ailerons, it is likely adverse yaw, caused by the difference in drag between the two wings when one aileron goes up (decreasing lift and drag) and the other goes down (increasing lift and drag). This is one of the primary purposes of rudder on a real world aircraft, to compensate for adverse yaw. Jets tend to be less prone to this than piston aircraft, and older piston aircraft (Cub, Stearman, etc.) are worse than more modern aircraft (Cessna 172, Piper Warrior, etc.). These differences in recip aircraft are because on older ones both ailerons travel the same amount, while on more modern aircraft the downgoing aileron travels maybe a third of the distance of the upgoing aileron.

That being said, however, few aircraft available for FS have truly proper flight models and, depending on which aircraft you're using, such effects could be either more or less than they should be.

[angels355]

That was a great answer. I used to fly a '46 Funk with my Dad when I was 8 to 10. Flying over jagged snow covered mountains in that plane was great for the sinuses, cleared 'em right up.


I wonder if I could ask you, how do you place photos in your signature section? For example I have prepared a photo that's on a floppy that I would like to have in my signature section at the bottom of my forum messages, how do I put it there? I tried attaching a photo but it came out as just a link. This format doesn't allow pasting in photos. Would I go to the profile section and copy and paste the ie address of the photo on my floppy into the URL window for photos located on an outside server?


What flight model(s) do you think are outstanding?

[lnuss]

You can put a photo (note the size restriction for the site) in your profile but putting in a link to a picture that is on the web. They used to also let you upload your photo for this purpose, but I'm not sure they still allow that.

I can't really recommend any flight models that I've downloaded as being great, although Dreamfleet's Baron isn't bad and Carenado's T-34 is not too bad. And David Copley's P-38s are fairly good. But between a friend and myself making mods, we don't fly even any of those without some changes. And unfortunately, many downloaded flight models are really sorry, some actually unflyable. But making good flight models and making good looking visual models are two distinctly different skills, and my artistry is lousy, so I appreciate the hard work and effort all these folks have put into providing models for our pleasure.

[angels355]

Thanks Larry,

I would like to encourage you to upload flight dynamics corrections, some people have done that and gotten a great following. I can't remember if I installed it, possibly I did, there was a flight model modification for the stock Lear 45 as its' pitch was really wild, same with the pitch on the stock Beech B350. When I switched over to Flight Simulator from Fly! I was really discouraged by this, but I thought it through and I think that all that needs to be done is to try flying these planes with the joystick sensitivity turned down, then when I want to fly the big jets press "reset default settings" for the joystick sensitivity settings.


I still fly Johan Diels POSKY 747's from FS 2000 I thought they were great. Many of those FS 2000 POSKY 747's were very difficult for me to fly for quite a while until I really worked at it. People like Diel take a lot of pride in their flight models.


I have downloaded a few aircraft in the past, a B1-B and the "Classic" TU-144, that were literally unflyable. The B1-B's authors admitted that they knew nothing about making flight models, and the plane would go into some sort of mid-air spasm soon after takeoff. The "Classic" TU-144 was messed up somehow, I had to uninstall it, fortunately there was an excellent upgraded TU-144. But these are extreme examples where the only solution was basically uninstalling them. There are many others that have more subtle lackings in their flight models. However I appreciate the hard work that freeware developers put into their aircraft even if they might have faults, I take the good with the bad. I fly so many different aircraft, and also have flown a lot of hours, that I think that compensates for any bad flight models I might come across. I haven't reached the point of being able to modify the flight dynamics of aircraft yet, but if I ever do I'll be a stickler using real world data. Another disappointment I came across was with modern F-4 Phantom aircraft from 02 and 04. There was a 70's era rendition of the F-4(E?) Phantom put together for FS 98, I don't have the name of the file or author at my immediate disposal, but I really liked that aircraft, it had nice sound, a nice panel, so so graphics of the plane itself(extremely basic), however I really liked the flight dynamics of that plane. I've watched a lot of F-4 landings, and when I land that FS 98 Phantom, my landings look just like the real world videos of real landings, to me that means that that is a more accurate flight model. The more modern F-4 phantoms have textures that beat the FS 98 F4 by a mile, however when I try landing the newer F-4's something is just not right, it just slams onto the runway, possibly I could really work on flying that plane experimenting with speed and trim to try to get it to behave, but I think those modern F-4 simulations need their flight models corrected possibly. The FS 98 F4 can be found just by looking for that description or title 70's era F-4E, I think it was about 2 mb's. I have that plane on FS 98, 2000, and 2004. There is also a very nice F-16D from FS 98, and several other aircraft from FS 98 that have really nice flight dynamics. I wish I could modify flight models but I haven't reached that point yet.

One thing that is a little bit of a mystery to me is with regards to the real world flight dynamics of the A380. I have come across three distinct flight models in freeware, Mike Stone's, Versluy(?), and an HGW model, I can't remember the authors. Stone's model has an extremely slow roll rate reflecting the enormous size of the plane, Versluy's(?) planes are very pleasant but it seems like the roll rate might be too fast, the HGW plane seems like it is just right with a moderate roll rate. But it is hard to say which is correct, because the A380 has fly by wire, and so the roll rate is not determined solely by the physics of the plane being acted on by the ailerons only, in many fly by wire planes other control surfaces are also tasked to accomplish a control input with maximum performance, so for example it's not just the ailerons rolling the plane but also the horizontal stabilizers/elevators acting asymentrically. I think the HGW model is nice.

Another pet peave is the amount of thrust a developer gives a plane, often times this is way off, either way too much power or way too little. But I don't want to discourage any freeware developers from doing their best, I appreciate everything. Hopefully one of these days I'll figure out how to modify flight models myself.

Have you tried X-Plane simulators? They proclaim very loudly that their flight dynamics are extremely scientifically accurate. I have been meaning to also get the X-Plane simulator but haven't gotten one yet, I'm still a very big fan of Flight Simulator though.

[ladamson]

>
>Have you tried X-Plane simulators? They proclaim very loudly
>that their flight dynamics are extremely scientifically
>accurate. I have been meaning to also get the X-Plane
>simulator but haven't gotten one yet, I'm still a very big fan
>of Flight Simulator though.

And if you were to keep current in reading the latest X-Plane forums, you'd find a lot of complaining about the default models, and how they are not up to date with the lastest release of X-Plane, and supposeably fly on the lousy side.

The claiming of superior flight models is all hype. In fact it's been about 12 years since the author of X-Plane set out to build a better flight model than MSFS. And of course, MSFS has changed quite a bit since then!

The reality is this, there are some exceptional flight models for for MSFS, and X-Plane. And both sims have the poor models too. These two sims use a different method of arriving at the flight dynamics, but each method has advantages & disadvantages.

And as with MSFS, a good X-Plane model needs some good tweaking. Just throwing weight & dimensions into X-Planes "plane maker" won't produce a replica.

Ladamson --- I have both sims

[angels355]

Thanks very much for that answer, that's big news to me, that X-Plane is all hype. I had very high hopes for it. You might find this funny but I nearly bought a Mac a few years ago, I delayed a little then found out that their performance is also just hype. There was a comparison between their new G5 w/ dual processors and a standard single processor pc a year or two ago in Extreme PC. The pc beat the dual Mac with embarrassing speed so to speak. They said that at that point even a 1.8 GHZ pc could beat the new dual G5. Apple seems to have finally given up and now use intel processors, but I believe there was a report on zdnet.com that this new intel Mac was not performing all that great. And there was another zdnet.com report that said that Microsoft's updates and service for Windows was far superior to Apple's who would leave exploits in their OS unpatched for extended periods of time. Apple also had problems in the past with accelerated obsolesence which wasn't very nice. So instead of getting one Mercedes priced Mac, I got several cheap pc's and I'm very happy with pc's.


I am most curious about the performance of the X-Plane X-15 and SR-71. What do you think of them? With the X-15 can you easily reach a minimum of 355,000 feet, and can you easily reach Mach 6 plus at half throttle in level flight at around 75,000 feet or so? Can you reach Mach 9.5 in level flight in the X-15? These are all real world numbers that the real X-15 could easily attain, the default plane should have had enough thought put into it to achieve these numbers, or is the X-15 disappointing also?


Is there a Beech B200 or B350, or Learjet? And how does it perform?


Do you think that X-Plane is a vital simulator to own or is it a big disappointment?


(The attached photo of this F/A-18E for FS 2004 is awesome, they also have a G model, but I like the E model better. They are freeware, on either flightsim.com or avsim.com )

[angels355]

OOPS! I'd like to correct my above blog, I put down that the dual processor G5 Mac was compared head to head with a single processor pc in "Extreme PC", that should be "Maximum PC magazine". Sorry for the blunder.