On 9/29/05 9:41 AM, in article
,
" wrote:

Thanks again. Great info. One more, if you don't mind: does the ACLS
tadpole act more like a flight director (like, say, the intersection
point of standard civilian jet ADI needles), or does it simply act more
like supersensitive ILS needles? I know it's the little cue that ends
up (hopefully) on top of the velocity vector, with a dot in the middle,
but am not sure which of the above it actually functions as.


It's raw ACLS data plain and simple. No roll-summed steering or flight
director commands are given. Also, on course/on glidepath are represented
by the tadpole being perfectly centered inside the velocity vector
(concentric circles). Many pilots castle priority to the HUD in order to
get the dot in the VV for reference too.

FYI, I'm also investigating to see if there's a way to record the
deviations from AoA, lineup and glideslope every, say, 10th of a second
or so, and then use statisitcs (root mean square, probably) to
calculate a landing grade. (A kind of mathematical LSO!) There's almost
certainly a way, but I doubt if Microsoft created those variables in a
way that would make it as easy as it seems.


United Airlines used that technique in their fixed-based simulators in the
interview process. It's not entirely accurate. The flaw with the United
sim was that pilots tended to get better scores if they didn't fly it like
an airplane and muscled the jet back and forth above, through, and below the
glideslope then back through to high and so on (and likewise with
courseline). This minimized the RMS errors (less time spent in the
deviation area), but made for a crappy approach that would have made pax
wonder what monkey was at the controls.

You'll have the same problem with your method in the Hornet CV
approach--e.g. no sane carrier aviator would fly from a high ball to a low
ball ON PURPOSE. They're taught to lead that correction in order not to
descend below the centered ball. Food for thought.

--Woody