I haven't been behind the controls of a real airplane in at least two and a half decades, and then I was a wide-eyed kid in the right seat (of a Cessna 152 or a Piper Cherokee that my uncle flew). I've occasionally played with various flight simulators over the years, including spending a bit of time flying the Bo-105 in FlightGear a year or two ago, but recently I decided to try the fixed wing thing again.
In trying to get better at landing, especially without the depth perception of real life or the feel of an airplane at low speeds, I've been playing with stall behavior, and I'm confused. I took the c172p up to 500 feet, cut the engine, pulled all the way back on the stick (yeah, I know, it's not authentic, but I have a stick, not a yoke), and as the speed dropped to 50kts or so the plane started into this sort of kite-like sink, but the ailerons were still pretty responsive. I also didn't hear a stall warning. Did a similar thing with the p51d, and was able to put the gear down and stall it all the way to a landing soft enough that it didn't trigger the crash detection. It at least did a little "nose down, pick up speed, nose back up" cycle, but I never had any problem keeping the wings level, and I expected quite a bit more loss of control from the ailerons at stall speeds. Now that I'm not 12 and fascinated more by flight than the logistics that go around it, I realize that there's as much to flying in trying to manage navigation and communication while maintaining altitude, so I'm fine with learning the other stuff, but is this behavior more accurate than I remember, a limitation of the flight model, or a limitation of the particular aircraft models? The other thing that seems weird is that rudder seems to affect the direction of the airframe very quickly, but not do much for the direciton of travel, in a way that feels weird. Again, faulty memory? Dan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
